The constitutionally endowed, 137,500-strong Royal Malaysian Police — ideologues of firmness, justice and circumspect — maintain national law and order, so the prime directive goes.
But in their genealogy, a sickly strain broke away from inside their DNA — a virulent character flaw that transforms helpful law enforcers into feral brutes. Recurring perversions of police brutality or societal bipolar disorder?
The violence has shapeshifted into variables of debasement, the latest being an investigation officer charged with raping a minor in Sungai Petani, Kedah, on top of four low-ranking officers detained for allegedly robbing and molesting a woman in Tanah Merah, Kelantan.
In its banality, it is shocking but unsurprising that these hideous crimes are not even the worst. For context, previous vulgarities need consideration: beating suspects to serious injuries or death, dubious shootings of teenage suspects, unresolved abductions of men of the cloth, the highest-ranking cop bashing a bound and hooded high-profile opposition politician and the diabolically cold-blooded murder of a Mongolian national under orders from higher ups.
To a lesser degree, but ominous too were cops convicted of armed robbery, drug trafficking and corruption.
Can we still trust our officers in blue? In a word, yes. In perspective, the delinquency constituted infractions by a minority because the vast majority are reliable, conscientious and trained to risk life and limb to serve and protect.
This Malay adage sums it up: "Kerana nila setitik, rosak susu sebelanga" (because of a drop of indigo, a jar of milk is ruined). Homicidal maniacs aside, the police force has been bigotedly profaned, perhaps beyond atonement under regnant public perception. To be fair, nobody, not even the police's harshest critics, is yelling "defund the police". Nonetheless, the sideswipe insists on legislative reforms for a stronger, just and sane policing, as propagated by the police motto. The top brass can assuredly turn their lethargy into major, pro-active clampdowns on bad hats of the brotherhood.
If the police can commit to a revolutionary downsizing of historical double standards in probing crimes involving policemen using libertarian inquiries, then the erosion in public confidence could be reversed. But you have to wonder: where does the violence and murderous instincts originate? This is where it gets delicately opaque.
In a nutshell, the sins of the police's black sheep illuminate the folly of their larger tribe, engineered and tormented by an ancient psychosis of frigid mores and social-sexual oppression.
The bigger tribe's depravity is ghastly: incest rape, parricide, filicide, child abuse — the psychosis conditioned into a silent but glaring syndrome more enlightening than the anthropologically complex dilemma a former prime minister modulated in 1970. Can this passive-aggressive angst be unriddled in the mainstream against generational indoctrination? Probably too dense to undertake.
But if the bigger tribe releases their civilisational pent-up strictures by openly crystallising free speech, association and thought, civil society — the prime minister's career dogma — might finally be purgative for the cops and Malaysia's communal good.