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I REMEMBER not too long ago that the police tried to improve its image with all kinds of PR campaign. But frankly, it is not that kind of campaign that will affect how the public think of the police. It is our everyday experience with them that counts.
I have heard from colleagues about their experience in pubs, bars or discos where customers sometimes get harassed during a raid. But on Monday night, or rather Tuesday morning on May 26, was the first time I witnessed first-hand how rude the police can be, and I was assured by some that this was relatively mild. I was with my son and his friends in a pub in Sri Hartamas, Kuala Lumpur. One of them was going back to the US and another was celebrating his birthday. Just after we finished singing the birthday song and toasting the birthday guy, we were interrupted by a man rudely demanding that we produced our ICs. He did not produce his police badge, did not say he was a police officer and when asked, he did not even bother to answer that question, but just demanded our ICs. Somebody in the pub, probably a pub worker, told us he was from the police. He took everybody’s ICs and, together with some other police officers, took his own sweet time recording down all the ICs. Apparently it was a police raid for illegal foreign workers. Only after over half an hour were our ICs returned to us one at a time. Now, illegal foreign workers are not the problem of the customers there. And the police officer should have identified himself, which he did not. Secondly, if we produced our ICs that showed we were locals and at a legal age to drink, he should not have taken away our ICs. If the police want to catch illegal foreign workers, that is fine with us, and it is for the pub owner and the illegal workers to answer to them. I find the behaviour of the police officers very distasteful. Many of us in the pubs were respectable people, many working as executives in corporations and we were just there for a drink. In fact, when my name was called, I discovered many IT executives were there. They even came up to greet me. Like I say, it is the everyday experience we have with the police that forms our perception. There is no point for the police to spend millions of our tax dollars on PR and advertisement to clean up their image as long as their personnel are behaving like this. They should clean up the force and the image will be improved automatically. CF, Kuala Lumpur.
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