I have often observed that, when confronted with widespread criticism, a bureaucrat's knee-jerk response is to set up a committee, with the declared intension to study and investigate whatever problems people are bitching about. It is one way of appeasing the beast of public opinion, at least for a while.

Naturally, such a committee will take time, a lot of time. By definition, a committee is where secretaries will take minutes, and innumerable meetings will take countless long hours.

The committee will also encounter resistance. Those who are investigated will put up all sorts of smoke-screens, false leads, and mendacious tall tales. I learned about these tricks during those years sitting on the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee as the sole opposition representative.

(Once I asked an education officer why a tin of condensed milk was supplied to a school for RM12 when it could be bought for RM1.20 in any supermarket. His deadpan reply was that they overlooked a typing mistake that had placed the decimal point wrongly on the tender document.)

Rare are the odd committees that can escape the iron dictate of Parkinson's Law; they all tend to expand their work in order to fill the time available for it. The nature of any committee is to generate work, especially paper work.

For instance, a committee will almost certainly want to form various sub-committees, in the name of division of labour for greater efficiency. Sometimes the work of the various sub-committees may over-lap. At other times, there is the danger of committees going in all kinds of conflicting directions.

Original purpose forgotten

That is the time to establish a hyper-committee, or an inter-committee committee, to liaise, coordinate, and supervise all the other committees. From the first committee, the bureaucratic body grows ad infinitum, like a cancerous tumour.

After a while, trapped in the labyrinth of records, memos, minutes, regulations, facts and half-truths, some of those sitting on the committees would have forgotten the original purpose of their existence.

As for the rakyat, the demos, the hoi polloi, well, you know they have more important things to worry about, like making a living, paying bills, and sending their children to school. They may have been exited for a while by the fanfare during the initial launching of the committee, but alas, perish the thought that their enthusiasm for public affairs should last for more than a few days.

Fortunately for the rest of us, there are also those few cantankerous souls, especially those in the so-called "civil society groups', who would keep an eye on the progress of these committees, or the lack of it. The odd members of parliament on both sides of the floor may also raise the odd awkward questions. They are generally ignored by the mainstream media. Again, fortunately for the rest of us, there is malaysiakini.com.

Tiny pricks of pressure here and there may eventually compel the committee to publish some kind of findings, interim or otherwise. For various reasons, we can expect such findings to be the result of much compromise, and the watered-down inconsequential conclusions will hardly satisfy the radical critics who cried out for the investigation in the first place.

This is how things are done in Malaysia, with very few exceptions. Suhakam is not an exception, proving itself to be just another lame duck committee, despite the good intention of some credible commissioners. In fact, the conservative tone of recent statements issuing forth from that committee has become progressively worse.

The exception

An exception that comes to mind was the investigation that found our nation's top policeman practising his boxing prowess on the face of a distinguished but defenceless prisoner under detention.

Under better, more democratic circumstances, as they exist in some other countries we know, such a shocking revelation would have scandalised the whole nation, and raised a public outcry for the blood of ministers. A more professional police force would have been shaken to the core.

Not so in Malaysia. We have our unique way of handling such things. The judge slapped the offending top cop on the wrist with a light sentence.

The message reverberating down the rank and file of the Malaysian police force was probably this: if you can get away with such slight punishment after beating up a former deputy prime minister, why restrain fists and boots when it comes to investigating petty criminals and ordinary citizens?

And so the long standing rot continues within the police force, until a newly minted prime minister decided to establish a royal commission to look into the roles and functions of the police, and to restore the good image of the men and women in blue.

That the prime minister needs a royal commission to investigate the police is a public admission that the internal mechanism for recruiting, training and disciplining police personnel has collapsed. It also means that the Ministry of Home Affairs and the minister himself has failed.

By right, another royal commission should have been set up to investigate the home ministry and the minister. But that is not the Malaysian way. After all, the prime minister is also the home minister. We will just have to leave aside my crooked logic for a while.

Nevertheless, the diligent letter writer Kim Kuek has raised many valid reservations about this royal commission. Who appoints the members of the commission, how they are appointed, who gets appointed, and their terms of reference and parameter of investigation, have everything to do with the outcome of the investigation.

The gentlemen sitting on the royal commission are certainly very distinguished figures with long records in public or private service. But that does not impress me much. The Suhakam commissioners have been, and are also distinguished citizens.

Besides, in a country where public honours for distinguished citizens do not always match the private judgement of the people regarding their moral worth, the authority of a long career and titular awards is not as sacrosanct as the prime minister may wish.

For instance, while I think that the integrity of some commissioners is beyond question, I share Elizabeth Wong's concern about the inclusion of the former Inspector General of Police Tun Hanif Omar. Her inventory of the skeletons rattling in the Tun's giant closet may not have been exhaustive enough. But it will do for our purpose of doubting the workability of the royal commission.

The irony

The irony of the whole thing is that most ordinary people do not need a royal commission to tell them how little the police force enjoys in the way of public trust.

I do not mean merely those opposition politicians and social activists who have to overcome police resistence in applying for a permit to hold peaceful gathering, confront the FRU warriors at times, with the prospect of ISA and other arrests hang heavily over their heads always.

(Every time I cannot access malaysiakini , my mind conjures up anxious images of swarms of policemen carting away computers and throwing Steven Gan et al into their lock-up.)

It is a pity that we do not have public opinion polls in Malaysia. (And why not?) If we do, and if people are asked to blacklist the government department they distrust the most, I suspect the police will be high up there on the very top.

Even the usually docile mainstream press carries constant reports of policemen committing crimes, raping women prisoners, beating up suspects during detention, taking bribes, committing robberies and extortions etc. You may not conclude that the whole police force is kaput, but you suspect something is seriously wrong.

What little police demeanour the press reports is probably the tip of the iceberg. The reality with police malaise is much starker, away from the limelight of public attention.

If you want to know the extent of police corruption, ask the humble taxi drivers and others involved in the transportation and construction industries. Has it not become a Malaysian way of life that those who own and drive a car cannot avoid the fate of settling an unofficial traffic fine on the spot, once in a while, especially prior to major festivities?

As for corruption among the crime fighters, you have to ask the people in the underworld. There, a patron-client relationship hums happily for decades. A godfather once told me that the difference between a policeman and a gangster is that the former has a state licence to inflict physical violence on citizens.

I can just see it now, godfathers being offered witness protection programme to testify before the royal commission to spill the beans on corrupt policemen. But then, why should these wealthy gentlemen from the murky world break their own golden rice bowl?

In conclusion, the establishment of the royal commission is not a bad thing. God knows how much we need to build our democratic institutions that will serve as the checks and balances in preventing abuse of power by the security apparatchik. There must be a great deal of anxiety shivering down the entire police force in the months ahead. The setting up of the royal commission is way overdue.

Pawn in power struggle

However, the small picture of corruption and abuse of state power among policemen has to be placed under a larger national canvass.

The prestige, power and influence of the police department can be traced to our nation's early history. Our obsession with law and order in times of violent strife has given legitimacy towards laws that give policemen awesome powers of arrest and detention.

In recent decades, as many commentators have pointed out, the police can no longer play the role of just another impartial neutral government department. It has become thoroughly politicised, as a pawn in the power struggle between the ruling and the opposition parties, as well as between factions within the ruling elite. The political cost to the country is the decay of police professionalism.

And if corruption is rather rampant within the police, should we be surprised? Corrupt policemen are just following the leadership by example, set by their political masters higher up the power ladder.

In short, the problems with our police force have their source in the repressive and patriarchal structure of our political organisation. To clean up their act in the police, you need to change crucial laws, and reconstruct the philosophy of having policemen based on democratic principles. As Kim Kuek suggests, you may even need to have "regime change".

All these essential steps, the royal commission cannot do.