'Shoot first' and The Star-The Malay Mail Online
OCT 14, 2013 — The official word given to the extrajudicial killing of suspected Mafia hitmen by the police at the height of the gangland wars in the late 1990s in Mumbai, India was an “Encounter.”
The theory being that the judicial process was so tedious and witnesses were so easily intimidated by the thugs that convictions were hard to attain and it was just easier to shoot them dead. For a while, “Encounter” cops were treated as heroes, organised crime declined and people felt safer.
Sounds familiar? It is the same playbook from which Malaysiakini alleges that the Home Minister and his cheerleaders have been operating, with a racist element added on with an eye towards the Umno elections. Now The Star has decided to lend a helping hand in the form of a column entitled “Rights for the Wronged”, on October 13, 2013. It calls Parliamentarians opposing “shoot first” naïve, tells the minister not to worry about carping journalists and lauds him for being a tough guy.
The justification being that when faced with armed criminals with malicious intent, the police have no choice but to shoot or get shot. It helpfully also points out that the victims of criminals, be they the police or members of the public, have rights too and rights that far outweigh those of criminals’.
So far, so good. It is the function of the police to deter crime with whatever means available at the time. Nobody in their right minds is saying that policemen are supposed to be sacrificial lambs not allowed to shoot when confronted with danger. That is the reason that they carry guns in the first place. Nobody has criticised the police for rescuing victims of an armed robbery by shooting the robbers dead.
The real issue is one of doing away with the system of checks and balances that ensure that the people entrusted with our safety do not let the power of the gun go to their heads. The column, in its rush to praise the great Rambo or James Bond or whatever, does not address this central concern of critics at all.
To go back to Mumbai for a bit, after the rise of the “Encounter” came the rise of the fake encounter. Now that the police were unfettered by any checks or balances, all kinds of abuses started coming to the fore. Now that the hand holding the gun was no longer accountable, the gun was used to settle all kinds of personal, religious and racial scores. The cops were now the gangsters. Now the public were more concerned about the extortionists in the police than the Mafia. Don’t want to settle your debt? No problem. Pay a rogue policeman, who will shoot first, plant a gun and call the creditor a gangster. A policeman harassing you? Better keep your mouth shut unless you are looking for an early demise.
While these are hypothetical examples, it is not a stretch to imagine what an environment like this can lead to. This is not an attack on PDRM as it stands. They need to have all the tools to accomplish their task as well as the means to act in self-defence without the fear of being hounded by the law or the public. It is just a simple reiteration of the old axiom, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” and the other bedrock of the judicial system, “better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man.”
The dictatorial instinct is a universal reality and there is a reason why it is so feared. Even the most well-intentioned benign autocrat comes to believe in his own infallibility. The first casualty is dissent when only one person holds the gun. From there it is but a short step away from a police state.
This is when the true meaning of “Rights for the Wronged” comes into play. When there are no checks on your power and you are Saddam’s son, you can pick up girls from their marriage altar for your personal pleasure, torture your football team for losing a match and pretty much any other depraved thing you fancy. What rights did his victims have?
This is the reason why it is specious to segregate the rights of the criminal and the victim in this manner where it is assumed that our men in blue holding the gun are always good and those at the other end of the gun are always criminals. Democracies understand that this is patently not true. The reason why the executive, the legislature and the judiciary exercise separation of powers as checks and balances over each other is to ensure that no one entity gets absolute power.
It is even worse when we advocate giving this blanket trust with no oversight to politicians. If an individual politician knows best, where is the guarantee that his gun will not be used to silence political opposition, take absolute power and plunder the country’s wealth? The world at large and our region in particular is littered with precisely such examples.
Crime has to be combated, but not with carte blanche to either the police or politicians. It is one thing to help the government as a mainstream newspaper, but quite another to advocate a policy of which usually the first victims as the bearer of bad news and dissent are journalists themselves.
The theory being that the judicial process was so tedious and witnesses were so easily intimidated by the thugs that convictions were hard to attain and it was just easier to shoot them dead. For a while, “Encounter” cops were treated as heroes, organised crime declined and people felt safer.
Sounds familiar? It is the same playbook from which Malaysiakini alleges that the Home Minister and his cheerleaders have been operating, with a racist element added on with an eye towards the Umno elections. Now The Star has decided to lend a helping hand in the form of a column entitled “Rights for the Wronged”, on October 13, 2013. It calls Parliamentarians opposing “shoot first” naïve, tells the minister not to worry about carping journalists and lauds him for being a tough guy.
The justification being that when faced with armed criminals with malicious intent, the police have no choice but to shoot or get shot. It helpfully also points out that the victims of criminals, be they the police or members of the public, have rights too and rights that far outweigh those of criminals’.
So far, so good. It is the function of the police to deter crime with whatever means available at the time. Nobody in their right minds is saying that policemen are supposed to be sacrificial lambs not allowed to shoot when confronted with danger. That is the reason that they carry guns in the first place. Nobody has criticised the police for rescuing victims of an armed robbery by shooting the robbers dead.
The real issue is one of doing away with the system of checks and balances that ensure that the people entrusted with our safety do not let the power of the gun go to their heads. The column, in its rush to praise the great Rambo or James Bond or whatever, does not address this central concern of critics at all.
To go back to Mumbai for a bit, after the rise of the “Encounter” came the rise of the fake encounter. Now that the police were unfettered by any checks or balances, all kinds of abuses started coming to the fore. Now that the hand holding the gun was no longer accountable, the gun was used to settle all kinds of personal, religious and racial scores. The cops were now the gangsters. Now the public were more concerned about the extortionists in the police than the Mafia. Don’t want to settle your debt? No problem. Pay a rogue policeman, who will shoot first, plant a gun and call the creditor a gangster. A policeman harassing you? Better keep your mouth shut unless you are looking for an early demise.
While these are hypothetical examples, it is not a stretch to imagine what an environment like this can lead to. This is not an attack on PDRM as it stands. They need to have all the tools to accomplish their task as well as the means to act in self-defence without the fear of being hounded by the law or the public. It is just a simple reiteration of the old axiom, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” and the other bedrock of the judicial system, “better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man.”
The dictatorial instinct is a universal reality and there is a reason why it is so feared. Even the most well-intentioned benign autocrat comes to believe in his own infallibility. The first casualty is dissent when only one person holds the gun. From there it is but a short step away from a police state.
This is when the true meaning of “Rights for the Wronged” comes into play. When there are no checks on your power and you are Saddam’s son, you can pick up girls from their marriage altar for your personal pleasure, torture your football team for losing a match and pretty much any other depraved thing you fancy. What rights did his victims have?
This is the reason why it is specious to segregate the rights of the criminal and the victim in this manner where it is assumed that our men in blue holding the gun are always good and those at the other end of the gun are always criminals. Democracies understand that this is patently not true. The reason why the executive, the legislature and the judiciary exercise separation of powers as checks and balances over each other is to ensure that no one entity gets absolute power.
It is even worse when we advocate giving this blanket trust with no oversight to politicians. If an individual politician knows best, where is the guarantee that his gun will not be used to silence political opposition, take absolute power and plunder the country’s wealth? The world at large and our region in particular is littered with precisely such examples.
Crime has to be combated, but not with carte blanche to either the police or politicians. It is one thing to help the government as a mainstream newspaper, but quite another to advocate a policy of which usually the first victims as the bearer of bad news and dissent are journalists themselves.
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