Two things happened this week.

First, a friend of mine, a young visiting student, was walking to her school when she was approached by three policemen. They asked whether she was Chinese or Japanese, and then demanded to see her passport.

She did not have it with her but did have her student card. The police told her it was not good enough. She offered to take them to her school which was only half a block away so they could confirm her status, but they refused and insisted on seeing her passport. In the end, they made her take all three of them six blocks back to her apartment.

Once there, they made themselves comfortable in her living room, sitting on the sofa, looking at her things and asking her personal questions about her life. She brought out her passport but they barely glanced at it, seeming to be a lot more interested in making conversation than in verifying the document.

She kept telling them that she needed to go to class but they would not leave and even tried to get her to join them for lunch. It took her nearly 20 minutes to get them out of her apartment.

When I heard the story I asked her to make a police report. No, she said. She had made a police report a month earlier when someone began stalking her. In the report she mentioned that she lived alone and also wrote down her contact number. Since then, someone from that police station had been calling frequently, asking if they could be friends.

This kind of behaviour is unsettling on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. First of all, the police approached someone and demanded to see documentation even though she was not breaking any laws or acting suspiciously.

Second, they refused to let her go to her school somewhere safe and public and instead went somewhere where she, a young woman, would be alone with three men. This is troubling because it sets a precedent for police impersonators. Women think that police have the right to make such requests and follow instructions unquestioningly, which puts them at risk for rape or murder.

Third, even after seeing the documentation, the police lingered, preventing a student from attending her classes. As a foreign student, she is required to attend a minimum number of classes or she will be reported to the Immigration Department.

Finally (but not really) there is no one to whom she feels she can report this behaviour since during her short stay in Malaysia, both her encounters with the police have resulted in harassment.

I urged her to call her embassy but would love to hear from malaysiakini readers if anyone has any further suggestions for what she can do. Needless to say, her impression of Malaysia has been soured and she is convinced that this country is unsafe for female visitors.

The other thing that happened this week happened to me. My bag was snatched. It was bound to happen sooner or later, even though I'm one of the most careful people I know, and I never carry anything valuable in my bag.

Nearly every other woman I know has had this happen, among them an eight-and-a-half month pregnant colleague who was knocked to the ground, an elderly widow who had recently lost her husband and so was carrying - and lost - the first love letter he ever sent her, and my housemate's aunt who was pushed aside so violently that she had to undergo costly and painful reconstructive surgery to get her face back.

The reason I put both these events into the same letter is because when my bag was snatched two thoughts went through my mind. The first was how dare the police demand that we carry important documents such as our passport and ICs with us at all times when they have done next to nothing about the rising number of snatch thieves.

Surely, until they can make the streets safer, they should at least accept photocopies so we don't have to pay for their shortcomings twice by losing our possessions as well as our time when we make reports and go through the bureaucracy of getting documents replaced.

Second, that if anyone wonders where the police are when our possessions are being snatched in broad daylight, they might think to look in the apartment of young foreign students who are being kept from attending their classes and who will have plenty of stories to tell their friends when they go back home.