Will the death of Kugan Ananthan in detention at the USJ-Taipan police station finally convince even the most gullible Malaysians that the police force have been getting away with ‘murder’ for far too long?

Somehow I doubt it. Aside from the principled minority of outraged and outspoken activists, most will soon shrug this incident off as just another atrocity they’re powerless to protest, and lapse back into their state of impotent apathy.

How many deaths as suspicious as this one will it take for the population to erupt in collective outrage and disgust? Since 2003, there have been over 1,500 deaths in police custody. That’s 300 per year on average, or almost one a day.