COMMENT The latest outrage concerning the shooting death of Aminulrasyid Amzah and the petulant response of inspector-general of police Musa Hassan harkens back to a similar episode in 1996.

raja aziz addruse interview judiciary crisis 060808 08 This had to do with alarming reports from NGOs that deaths in shootouts with police over the preceding 18 months was something like 35 which prompted senior member of the Bar and president of Human Rights Society (Hakam) Raja Aziz Addruse ( right ), to suggest that cops had become “trigger-happy”.

Raja Aziz’s stricture drew a feisty response from then IGP Abdul Rahim Noor.

The police chief just about told the Hakam president that if he expected his men to read their dangerous quarries a bill of rights in life-and-death situations, he was expecting what never was and never will be.

In short, Rahim Noor was intent on telling effete guardians of our civil liberties that in the serious business of putting out of business denizens of the underworld, there is little time for the men in blue to pause to consider shades of grey.

NONE To Rahim Noor ( left ) at least, matters concerning the seedier members of society were very much black and white. You have no business to be caught in between; heaven help you if you were.

One cannot make inferences about the extent to which this worldview of Rahim’s led to his failure to differentiate between hardened criminals and an ex-deputy prime minister whom he punched barely two years after his revealing exchange with Raja Aziz, except to say that that failure cost him dear.

It led to his conviction for assault and jailing.

This was a pity, more so in hindsight which found Rahim to have been a more effective IGP at crime prevention, officer training and provisioning, than his successors - Norian Mai, Bakri Ismail and the present Musa Hassan.

It’s 1996 all over again

Nine shootout deaths – six in one incident in Kedah in February last year, two in another incident in Taiping last month, followed by the shooting death of Aminulrasyid last week have put the glare of adverse publicity back on the police force once again. It’s 1996 all over again.

musa hassan police igp force It didn’t help matters that the present IGP aped the petulance of his predecessor Rahim Noor vis-a-vis Raja Aziz’s criticism by threatening to take his men off the streets in response to the furor over the shooting of Aminulrasyid.

In the latter vein, would Musa quit before his contract is up in September if it is established that Aminulrasyid’s death was due to 'trigger happy’ cops?

The present figures on custodial deaths and deaths from shootouts with police make it imperative that the government shake off the dust that has collected on the recommendations of the 2003 royal commission on the management of the force, released in March 2005.

Senior officers mounted a successful filibuster against the implementation of its central recommendation which was the creation of a panel to adjudicate public complaints of abuse by the police.

That stiff-arming of a royal commission, composed of eminent persons including a former IGP, Haniff Omar, was something that should not have been tolerated.

The entire episode provided disquieting evidence that the force is an actor of its own accord, not an entity responsible to the state, something a parliamentary democracy ought not to tolerate.   

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.