Wednesday 27 June 2012

Don’t blame your police, blame your government

 

JUNE 27 — I am tired of Pemandu making the media its scapegoat for the “perception” of crime in this country. Crime is a problem in this country and it is not getting better, except in trumped-up studies conveniently published in ruling coalition-friendly newspapers.

Whatever I may have to say will probably be brushed off by them as “anecdotal” and “not backed up by statistics.”

I’m sorry, your statistics are wrong.

Just in the last week, a friend fell victim to an attempted mugging at The Curve. A man and his son were assaulted by some “rempit” not even 200 metres from my house, near the Kelana Jaya LRT. Just a year or so ago, “rempits” also attacked my siblings around the same location, chasing them to my doorstep.

“Rempits” were at my doorstep assaulting my siblings, Pemandu, and you have the gall to tell me rising crime rates are “perception”?

Who doesn’t know someone who’s been mugged or a victim of either snatch theft or a burglary? You don’t need a think tank or a fancy research agency to discover that too many of us, if we don’t know a victim of crime, were.

Still, I can’t place all the blame at the doorstep of the police. The police force is what the government has made it.

They’re dependent and subservient to their masters, their sources of food, but when let off the leash, they grab whatever they can get. Hence the sudden appearance of policemen in droves before the festivities.

While the cops collect “coffee money”, crime also rises because, hey, thieves need to celebrate their respective festivals, too.

The dogs are too hungry to keep the wolves from the sheep. The dogs are so hungry, they eat the sheep. Why blame the dogs when it’s the masters at fault?

Masters who breed their dogs to be subservient and vicious, and not to protect the flock as if it were their own. Properly bred sheepdogs would never think of eating sheep but the masters don’t want sheepdogs but obedient, hungry lapdogs.

Before a group of military men come to my doorstep to moon me with their geriatric behinds, I would like to clarify: I am not calling our policemen dogs.

I am just saying they’re treated like dogs. Starved and kept subservient.

Like in the recent cases of dog attacks, I never blamed the dogs. I blamed their masters for letting them get that way.

Policemen are housed in cramped barracks. Given shoddy pay (it must be if they’re so busy asking for bribes all the time). Have dangerous jobs that don’t allow much upward mobility and comes with added baggage of being treated like scum by both the people they serve: the government and the rakyat.

The cops are the way they are because they don’t have much choice. You do have a choice: to either condemn them or condemn those who aren’t making it easier for them to do the jobs they were supposed to do.

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