Police violence? Are inmates running the asylum?

 

 “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,” wrote French writer Jean-Baptist Alphonse Karr in the 1840s.

The sentiment is roughly translated as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, and I must say it was running through my head as I perused two news items of deaths involving the police yesterday.

The lesser-known fatality is that of a female suspect who died after spending four days in police custody in Langkawi, Kedah.

Aged 34, she passed away four days after being arrested under Section 15(1)(a) and Section 39B of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952.

Bukit Aman Integrity and Compliance Department director Azri Ahmad said an autopsy is underway and the cause of death is being investigated.

Let’s hope for justice.

What prompted a public outcry was the arrest of a senior police officer for his alleged involvement after a 17-year-old student motorcyclist was hit by a car and killed near Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan (SMK) Jati on Friday.

Ipoh district police chief Yahaya Hassan said the officer, who is attached to the Kedah police contingent headquarters, was remanded to assist in the investigation under Section 41(1) of the Road Transport Act 1987.

According to media reports, it appears that the incidents leading up to the boy’s death may have involved road rage. What’s certainly true is that video footage of attempts to save his life was heart-rending.

Letting crooks investigate themselves

Let’s hope for justice because regardless of the specifics of these cases, the bottom line always seems to be that police are investigating themselves.

Is it any wonder that a cynical public now expects incidents to be swept under the carpet? In our minds, officers are merely let off lightly with a transfer to a new location being a favoured option.

Furthermore, all this happened on a week when the family of my late friend Teoh Beng Hock presented a petition to an officer from the Prime Minister’s Office after failing for nearly a year to meet the prime minister himself to push for more action on this case and to bring the perpetrators to justice.

It dates back to July 16, 2009, when Teoh was found dead on the fifth-floor service corridor of Plaza Masalam in Shah Alam after being questioned overnight on the 14th floor of the Selangor MACC headquarters.

To this day, there are as many questions as answers a Royal Commission of Inquiry determined in 2011 that Teoh was driven to commit suicide following aggressive questioning by the MACC, while in 2014, the Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that his death was caused by the act of “a person or persons unknown”, including the MACC officers who questioned him overnight before he was found dead.

The late Teoh Beng Hock

I’ll never forget how after the Pakatan Harapan government took office in 2018, then home minister Muhyiddin Yassin named a task force to look into Teoh’s death, packing it with a string of insiders who may or may not have been biased, especially if law enforcement (or the MACC in that case) was to be proven culpable.

How many hundreds of statements and speeches need to be delivered for the proper introduction of a truly independent body like the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) recommended by an RCI in 2005?

How much longer will the Sedition Act and Sosma continue to hang over our heads?

Violence from our protectors

I can’t forget how in July 2021, the families of three lads shot dead by police in 2010 were awarded over RM1.5 million in damages by the Shah Alam High Court.

The appalling miscarriage of justice was recognised by the courts after Muhammad Shamil Hafiz Shapiei, 15, Mohd Hairul Nizam Tuah, 22, and Muhammad Hanafi Omar, 21, had been shot dead by police at Glenmarie, Shah Alam, on Nov 13, 2010.

On Sept 1, 2016, the Court of Appeal granted judgement in favour of the families, ruling that the victims were illegally shot dead by the police.

Human rights lawyer N Surendran told me in 2021 that the evidence debunked the police’s initial claim that the youths were armed with machetes and had tried to attack them after earlier robbing petrol kiosks in Monteres and Bukit Subang and that they had to open fire.

“The post-mortem showed that the angle of entry bullets, number of bullets fired, and the distance they were fired from all negated the police’s version of events.

“The post-mortem made it very clear that the police version was not true and what had happened was that the boys were made to kneel, their shirts were pulled over their heads, and they were executed on the spot.

“The bullet entry wound on Shamil was at a 45-degree angle, thus proving that he must have been kneeling. There was also gunshot residue on the shirts showing the bullets were fired from close range,” Surendran told me at the time.

The truth is that, from the disappearances of Pastor Raymond Koh and activist Amri Che Mat to scores of custodial deaths, to unexplained police shootings, all around us there are signs that our supposed protectors have been the ones to commit violence.

So, should we really still hope for justice? - Mkini

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MARTIN VENGADESAN is associate editor at Malaysiakini.