MARCH 26 — Police abuse of power is the most frightening aberration in society. Investigations into deaths in custody by the Human Rights Watch sees unreasonable use of force have yet to result in successful prosecution, suspension, or reform.
Accountability, which refers to procedures that place police officers and law enforcement agencies responsible for their actions, is treated like a diptera that irritates the head that wears the crown.
In some ways, a preference for bureaucratic culture that permeates all Malaysian society impedes and obfuscates the due processes of accountability.
Bureaucracy is a system and culture where power is delegated in a highly hierarchical and alienating fashion.
Workers in the lower rungs of a corporate, military, or police bureaucracy rarely if ever engage directly with those at the top of the pyramidal bureaucracy who makes decisions.
Bureaucrats operate like small cogs in a micro-system within a larger machine of an organisation (the efficiency of such a machine is disputable).
They are trained to do highly specialised work, their training and specialisation is a mark of their identity, and they are part of a tightly disciplined chain of command.
Those at the frontline who must engage with the public using arbitrary degrees of restraint and force manifest the rationality of order defined by their superiors.
They are not immediately responsible for their actions because they are simply following orders of their superiors who are following orders from their superiors and so on.
From post-war Germany, post-communist Cambodia to post-Suharto Indonesia, men who perform the most brutal of state-sanctioned murders were simply following orders. They were just doing their job for king or leader, religion or ideology, and country.
How can “innocent’” people be assured that only those who err on the wrong side of the law are caught by its long, hyper-flexed arm when law enforcers operate without due accountability? How can people who are confident of their innocence know that their definition of “justice” is the same as that held by enforcers of the law?
Anyone in society who thinks differently and dares to raise their head above the parapet is liable to be a suspect of the state.
However, in many instances, the suspect is not just anybody but rather someone who has only the potential for influence—this is enough to be an irritant on the scabrous body politic of the police force.
The recent intimidation of the human rights lawyer Michelle Yesudas and needless investigation of journalist Aisyah Tajuddin demonstrates how a bureaucratic police culture operates in a different moral universe.
It is a culture disinterested in the protection of fearless women, preferring instead to reinforce female passivity through its own definition of feminine innocence.
Police power which grows more ravenous every day seeks the lifeblood of the people they are meant to protect. A nation with a police force that is out of control while maintaining their own rationality of order can mutate into a police version of a stampeding military dictatorship.
During times of state crisis in a military dictatorship like Egypt and Pakistan, the military is called upon to reinstate order, ironically through extreme violence.
As the most “stable” and disciplined state institution thanks to its rigid hierarchies of command and immediate access to devastating weapons, the military and police can suspend and diminish cultural and social understanding of protection in the name of enforcing “order.”
The “faceless” edifice of police bureaucracy must be dismantled through a better understanding of how and why it operates like a paradox - in that it has the overwhelming power and legitimacy to protect and destroy.
Other practical interventions into police bureaucratic culture recommended by Human Rights Watch is the establishment of an independent and external complaints commission who will receive, investigate, and have sufficient authority to submit cases of abuse by the police for prosecution.
Increasing disaffection and lack of trust in the police and modes of secular law enforcement in Malaysia may be one of the factors behind the support for hudud amongst many Malay-Muslims.
Methods of meting out “justice” closed off from the public desperate for a semblance of transparency have created a demand for the spectacle of justice where the guilty are openly punished and forever marked by guilt.
But this is only a speculation on my part.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
