©New Straits Times
(Used by permission)
THIS is how defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory. What was hailed four
months ago as a record–breaking success in the war on drugs –– a seizure of
nearly RM50 million worth of assorted narcotics, resulting in the arrest of a
dozen felons and the disruption of an international syndicate –– turns instead
into another shameful embarrassment for the police. The apparent disappearance
of RM1 million worth of syabu from a strongroom in the Johor state police
headquarters, with evidence indicating an "inside job", sits discomfitingly
among similar thefts in recent years. In each case, mid–level officers have been
punished for dereliction of responsibility by being reassigned to other duties.
To an extent, the police force is granted the right to keep
its own house in order –– an article of faith born on pragmatism, considering
the difficulties inherent in the police being called on publicly to investigate
themselves. The continuing impulse towards establishing a commission to oversee
the police, however, is only accelerated by incidents such as these. This lends
urgency not only to the need to solve this crime, but to ensuring there is no
hint that the police would prefer to cover it up rather than get to the bottom
of it.
One wonders, though, how much the general public loss of faith in the country's
security forces has conduced to the sort of fatal cynicism that would have
enforcers prefer to be hanged as sheep than lambs. With millions of ringgit in
seized assets languishing in their strongrooms, what temptations must befall the
guards? As we are at present witnessing with the Immigration Department, where
the arrest of senior officers on suspicion of complicity in illegal activities
seems hardly to have cowed junior ranks into sticking to the straight path, the
rot may have so permeated such agencies that it hardly matters whether or not
the fish rots from the head, once the entire entity is riddled with a loss of
faith.
Hence, while the Anti–Corruption Agency pounds its beat with renewed resolve,
picking up sundry civil servants and government contractors to examine their
palms for grease, and while public opinion continues to demand that the guilty
be ferreted out and punished to the fullest extent of the law, it is truly
dispiriting when the enforcers themselves continue to betray what frail shreds
are left of the public trust. Without that trust, it should go without saying,
they do not serve the nation's security but undermine it.