There is not a power on earth that has not relied on some form of terror. Man lived not merely in fear of invaders who would ride furiously in from the distance, he lived in fear of gods or of God and his representatives on earth. He lived in fear of the authority of officers and of the bailiffs of his own masters, in fear of losing his home or the food he needed to stay alive or his land or his work. Every effort to liberate man has in fact been an effort to liberate him from fear…. – Ivan Klima (The Spirit of Prague, 1994, Granta)
Jenice Lee’s description of the humiliation inflicted on her is revealing to some, not unfamiliar to others. But, above all, it scratches only the surface. She describes only the women’s part of the police prison, and she was there for three nights. In the men’s side, she might see cannabis rolled in plastic films cut out from bags brought in with the breakfast and these are then distributed in the anus of men to Sungai Buloh and other prisons. There are nightly beatings. The police conduct periodic raids against foreigners – Indonesians, Bangladeshi mostly – bring them in, order them to empty their pockets and change, and take all their money. Young Malaysians brought in for the first time are allowed one telephone call; for that prison guards charge MYR50 a call, that’s dollars not cents. Other policemen act as couriers to bring in cigarettes; prices vary.
Note the part that Jenice describes the policemen loitering in and out the changing room; they act not just as voyeurs, they may have the mind to rape her. In another circumstance, she won’t be so lucky and the uniform the policemen wear doesn’t count for a thing. For proof of what a policeman is capable of, asks the ghost of Altantuyaa Shaariibuu. The ravenous sexual appetite in the policemen is stirred not only because she is youthful, so much the better if she is Chinese because decades of race politics does not produce neutral ethical consequences, or none. Rather, it renders anybody who is not a bumiputra inferior in status far, far more than just share ownership of companies. Racism is rewarded, after all; dishonest work is also rewarded, whereas genuine, independent meritorious work is badly paid. The corollary in all this is that anybody not assigned the preferred race is inferior, and would be treated as such. The police department is not inure to such influences.
This inferiority status is supported in a user comment below the video. The comment user, a kid really, ridicules Jenice and calls her “amoi”; it is the kind of vernacular sexual description of some lowly women to serve his penis, if ever he gets his hands on her. Farther evidence to this, treating in particular Chinese women as objects of penile fantasy, is reflected in numerous forums (Malaysia Today for example). You see them in Parliament (recall Bung Mokhtar Radin, et al) and in the Cabinet, in one Ahmad Zahid who pimps Chinese girls to strip to the pelvis for an election campaign and he calls it “culture”.
But, there is a problem to the police prison description. It doesn’t square with numerous other accounts in summarizing police conduct, “police state” being the most common. Legislator Teresa Kok of the party DAP refers to the police, and by context the Brickfields police, as the lapdog of political masters. Fahri Azzat, not equally sanguine about the state of affairs, prefers to define the arrest by Brickfields as an abuse of power. Another lawyer and politician, says the Brickfields police chief is “out of control”.
One reason for the anomalies in these mass media cliches rests on perspective. For Fahri to suggest there’s abuse of power, it is only because he took the arrest of the five lawyers and 14 others on May 7 in isolation. Teresa saw police arrests only through her political lens, that is, as a pattern of political conduct stemming from the Umno government. Jenice, in contrast, described what she was subjected to. So, her personal account is a series of objective snapshots driven from inside the police and out into the world. This is a kind of reality vastly different from the abstract labels, lapdogs, police state, and so on, that mostly convey little, if any, concrete or substantive idea. You don’t get a sense of what exactly they mean.
There is a more sinister, if unintended, consequence in describing police capriciousness and brutality in terms of mass media cliches. They conceal the true identity of the police. Concealing the true identity renders impotent a fact of public knowledge and that which common people have lived with for years. It is that the police are a gang, not as a sinister description but in the activities many of them live by. Some go for extortion and blackmail; many offer services (Tunku Aziz’s word) on payment; the lowly have their street methods, the higher-ups have their business and political connections graduating to positions in the board of directors once they retire. They have hired-guns on the payroll (think again of Altantuyaa), common people think of some as racketeers, others as political cohorts, that is, as an armed political unit of the ruling party.
Such assertions seem either far-fetched or exaggerated only because, until the arrival of Pakatan Rakyat, extra-legal police activities bear no serious political ramifications. Without political ramifications they were tolerated. Law enforcement was primarily a household affair, of little national significance. One common household notion: thieves get what they deserve, even if they are treated badly in lockups. Either thieves pay with a bribe or they pay a fine from jail. It is the same dilemma that confronts a driver each time he faces a traffic policeman.
The piece of fiction that the policeman is either ethically or professionally neutral is not a common place idea. Yet it survives in present form, such as in Tunku Aziz, who has had a good, long life, with nothing to worry about being picked up by the police and who essentially advances the few-bad-apples argument. Indeed, he suggests that the police are, by birth seemingly, upright, doing an unenviable job in impossible circumstances. Which is to say it is not the police fault that they behave the way they do. The police get a bad rap because of a “hate campaign”; that is, the police, too, have opponents who lie.
Thus spake Tunku Aziz, who it must be remembered was brought in by Lim Kit Siang into the DAP central committee so he has yet to say that his party mate Jenice was “deserving” of the police lockup service.
The willingness to call the police by its true name will help the Opposition not only deal with it but offers some answers to intriguing questions. It answers the question why, and not merely how, thieves and robbers have taken over the streets from the police. It answers the question why the police are against the setting up of vigilante groups, such as the DAP Polis but don’t mind paid neighbourhood patrols, and why agencies like Rela under its supervision is so noted for their brutality against immigrants.
There is one way to deal with a gang: put it out of business. Of course, the police are aware of this prospect under a new government. And this prospect raises a dilemma. If the police are available for the hire – for instance, as an armed political unit – it makes no difference to them who is the paymaster. True? This probably underlies the reason that the police are tougher on the DAP than on the PKR, on Hindraf than on PAS. On the same issue, Perak, police are tougher on Karpal Singh than on Nizar Jamaluddin. Such a discriminatory tactic poses a problem within Pakatan Rakyat. Can they agree on police reformation as a priority of its government, first to disband the entire structure, fire the top dozen officers, then to reconstitute and to rehire every rank and file, case by case?
But there are signs of differences in how PKR, DAP and PAS regard the police. Only, however, the mass arrests of 160 people in recent weeks finally tore apart the veil of the police as an independent guardian of the law and comes out the other side as an armed political unit for hire.
There is, therefore within Pakatan, an uncoupling of language from reality. In the clip below, Perak DAP leaders are talking about who constitutes the legitimate government with, of all people, the policemen.
Such kind of talk harks back to the notion of a lapdog. If the police can have its uses by Umno now, could not the Pakatan use the police in the future should the occasion demand it? To accuse police as lapdogs is also to concede that the police are subjected to a higher power (Umno) and that they, especially, have no volition, no free will, of their own. Without an independent free will, the logical conclusion is thus reached: the police is not entirely responsible for what they do, says Tunku Aziz. Yet this is not what a Malaysiakini report says. To say, “Cops aggravating BN’s headache” is to infer that the police acted not on orders or in contravention of BN orders. They acted out of their own volition.
If there is confusion within the Opposition into seeing the true nature of the police – that they are a gang reporting only to themselves – it is probably because different members draw conclusions from different backgrounds and experiences. Typically, PKR criticisms of the police are directed at assumed political masters, that is, Umno. They (Selangor chief minister, for example) talk of “excessive” police enforcement but never the malice and the ogling that goes on in the women prison cells. If the PKR keeps at this, then it offers the moral justification – if Umno, why not us? – for the day when the police becomes of use to the party. This is also to say that, like Umno, the PKR treats policing as an extension of political activity, but it has yet to answer the question a gang institution will demand: how are you going to cut us a deal? Like the judiciary, is policing not a business?
Inside PAS, whose members have stronger moral strictures than the PKR, they appear to despise the police in their hearts, without saying so. Few of the 160 arrests in May are PAS members and this speaks of their unwillingness to have anything to do with the police because, unlike the PKR, they seem not to see policing as political activity but as an Umno appendage. There is a nuanced difference between the two. The question they appear hesitant to answer is this: Is the police an independent, institutional gangland answerable only to itself and, if so, what is to be done?
The DAP is somewhere in between the PAS and PKR positions. As long as Karpal Singh is around, Lim Kit Siang will only use echo boards to lean towards the PKR position. Chief among the propagandists is, of course, Tunku Aziz, followed now by one Augustine Anthony. The latter reminds of Augustine Paul with an appetite for bullhorn phrases and of Kit Siang struggling with tortuous 70-word-long sentences in pretence of Shakespearian prose. Here’s one inanity from Augustine, a man who is no respecter of history, culture, the dead, or religion:
These YB’s must bear in mind that it takes more to continue winning the hearts and minds of the people than apple distribution in parliament house or bicycle paddling to the parliament entrance or constant holding of candle light in vigils and screaming “Saya YB, Saya YB” when apprehended by the law enforcement officers or even offering prayers to the ghost of unknown Ghengis Khan descendant who was blown to smithereens.
Thus spake Augustine Anthony, the man who, in employing the words of Yankee occupiers in South Vietnam, reduces politics to one formula, hearts and minds. He bears the exact same condescension – “you stupid morons, next time ask me before you get arrested” – as Glenn Anthony, the Ipoh CID chief shouting, One-Two-Three Tangkap. Decades of race politics produces this ethical, superior-inferior quality in Malaysia. It includes talking down to people: “Sit boy! Sit!” It used to be just race; now it extends to political persuasions. (And note, not one PAS member were among the eight legislators arrested and Augustine – conveniently for him? – was not in the way of the police.)
Augustine’s ranting is closely associated to Tunku Aziz’s comments in one respect: Opposition people like Teresa Kok and Jenice Lee asked for trouble. They invite arrest (incidentally, both articles are posted in Lim Kit Siang’s blog). If this is true, then it follows that the police are merely doing their job, that is, Teresa and Jenice “deserve the police service” they get. Here it is from Tunku Aziz:
Criticisms of the PDRM (Polis Di-Raja Malaysia) have lately turned ugly: they have been reduced to what amounts to a hate campaign. I believe this attitude is totally counterproductive because as citizens we deserve the police service we get.”
Note the commonality between Tunku Aziz’s core message – don’t blame the police – and Anwar Ibrahim’s proclivity for intellectualizing that says, in effect, “mass arrests is a symptom of a fearful and tottering Umno.” Which seems to suggest this: “the police are being made use of, don’t you see. In time, we can have use of the police as well.” Truth, reality, ethical conduct – the underlying problems of the nation – gets second place in political machinations coming from Anwar, Tunku Aziz et al.
Or, is it simply, they don’t see?
But none of that intellectualizing afflicts the most precious thing – the heart – that goes on in a prison cell where Jenice was thrown. This explains why she is so troubled.
Once the police act to inflict fear (in common parlance, to teach you a lesson), then the problem for those in police hands is no longer centred on the law. The problem shifts and falls into another category, that is, staying alive – which is typically the kind of fear that accompanies sudden disappearances from the home or from the street. The death of A Kugan in police custody, along with other brutalities, is a reminder of the consequence of falling into police hands. This has become so dangerous, so fatal, that it suddenly matters how long you are kept in a lockup. The longer the duration, the greater is the anxiety. Why?
The answer has already preceded the question. Of course, police must get a remand order; Kugan was under remand, after all. There is no shortage of magistrates to offer police the maximum period of detention, and note how consistently the police refuse lawyer access in order not to set any more precedents; sometimes they will not even tell where people are held.
But this, the fear of what’s to happen next, is a crucial agent in inflicting terror. Once police conduct an arrest with impunity (as Fahri has suggested), the life that is your own automatically dissolves. That life falls into the mercy of the terror. There are safeguards, of course, but these are so rickety they amount instead to complicity. For one thing, the law exists no longer to protect society, it exists as a tool of terror. And then there are honourable people who lend support to the terror; Tunku Aziz comes to mind. Magistrates issuing remand orders are now so routine they act like premeditating brutality. Tunku Aziz praising the police was being pernicious, spiteful of common people, and he had acted as an attendant to tyranny.
This, then, is the same tyranny: the police have not changed in forty, fifty years because the law has always been its instrument. The one difference between now and before is in numbers: as the statute books swelled, policing powers grew and, with it, the increased capacity to inflict fear from households to politicians. The police have now a range and a diversity of laws to put anybody away.
The other difference is that it has lately been more political and therefore more public. Being public, the two functions – law as instrument, police as executioner – visibly merge. The police becomes the director. As director he visits the scene, picks the cast, takes them home, assign the roles – you live, you are charged, you stay two more nights, you go to jail. This is to say the executioner takes over the law; he becomes the law, he is the new force in politics. His powers have grown to the extent it is now possible to arbitrate over who wins an election gang war.
