For those interested, Amnesty International had posted a rather long document on their recommendations for police reform in Malaysia. Isn’t it sad? We’ve had a Royal Commission to examine our police force, and outsiders making benign recommendations and still nothing seems to change. You can find a link over here:

Malaysia: Towards Human Rights-based Policing


I had a sober moment today: a troublesome cocktail of sleep-deprivation, nail-biting tension and such. We tend to complain quite a bit, don’t we? Do we have a cause for complaint, though? I’d like to think so. The question that occurred to me, however, is one I’ve had thrown in my face several times over the years: “if you think it’s so bad, what’s your suggestion”? Well, we have one example of an alternative above. What’s stopping us?

Entrenched political interests?

The safety of being fashionably jaded?

Oh, and my favourite: “you’ve not been off-country, you think things are bad here, it’s worse elsewhere!” Well, yippee, how fun. For those who’d like to employ this particular diatribe, I’d like to remind you that for a large part of the population, this country is the only country they’ll ever know, firstly.

Secondly, this amounts to contrasting deplorable conditions in other countries and then contending that our situation is comparatively better than others, concluding therefrom that we have no cause for complaint. If a problem exists in this country, comparisons do nothing to mitigate or eliminate these problems.

Unless, of course, fashionably-jaded types have pretensions to a more regional perspective while ignoring the situation at home: that’s like having your house on fire while commenting we’re better off because houses in other countries have completely burned down.

How amusing.

Also, for those interested, there’s also the Asian Human Rights Commission website with an interesting write-up on the spectre of police brutality in Malaysia, if any of you are unconvinced about what the police get up to. The link’s over here:

Police Brutality, Shootings and Deaths in Custody

You might be interested in this, too:

UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials

MENJ has a post over here, in which he describes how his cousin-in-law sort-of defends “ear squats” as part of standard police procedure. He may be right: perhaps there’s a manual somewhere describing the precise motions and “angles of attack” of the knees for one to fully benefit from of ear-grabbing, squat-like calisthenics.

But don’t just take MENJ’s cousin-in-law’s word for it, ya? NST carries a newsbreak here where Deputy Internal Security Minister Noh Omar defended these procedures as “standard” and consonant with lock-up rules and standing orders:

“I dare say everything was done following the rules,” he said in response to the public outcry over a video-clip which shows a Chinese woman made to perform squats in the nude in a police lock-up.

“There are lock-up rules and Standing Orders and I will answer this in detail in Parliament tomorrow. I will quote under what section and what rules this is allowed,” he said in the lobby of Parliament House.

Help me out here, I’m losing my ability to catch ironies in situations nowadays, but it’s so heart-warming for us citizens to have the Deputy Internal Security minister say all of the above, isn’t it?

This is what’s extremely disturbing: for all you know, the ‘procedures’ might follow established rules and all that jazz, they might be part of “standard police procedure”, yes? That makes the abuse and humiliation something sanctioned by said “rules”.

So how’s that for institutionalized brutality and abuse, eh?