COMMENT | It is often said that woes arrive in waves and calamities tend to cluster. Few institutions exemplify that maxim more painfully this week than our police force, whose reputation has been derided, pulverised, and publicly pilloried - largely through its own doing.

If the initial incident raised eyebrows, the statements that followed from senior officers only deepened public suspicion.

Instead of clarifying matters, they cemented the perception that the “self-defence” narrative was little more than a convenient fiction - a flimsy justification for shooting three men in cold blood.

On Nov 24, Malacca police chief Dzulkhairi Mukhtar announced that...