Malaysian Insider: Did we kill Aminulrasyid?-- Nathaniel Tan

Did we kill Aminulrasyid?-- Nathaniel Tan

Malaysian Insider; APRIL 30 — Some  friends of mine were once robbed at the cybercafe which we frequent (yes, still addicted to Dota). The men came in with parangs, threatened everyone, collected the goods and tried to make their escape.

One man wasn’t able to start his getaway motorcycle quickly enough, and this cost him dearly. Most of the cybercafe came out, descended on him and, well, beat the crap out of him.

This, I understand, is not an entirely uncommon fate for robbers and thieves who are caught by a mob.
Apparently, it is not an uncommon fate for those caught by the police either.

When I first blogged about the death of Kugan, more than a few commentators wrote and said things like: “He deserved it”, “Why should you care about a car thief?” and so on. Oddly, this debate still takes place on said blog post, well over a year after it was written.

Some of my loved ones have also expressed certain sentiments about how justice for these petty criminals cannot be served within our sluggish judicial system, and that sometimes what they really need is a good box around the ears that no one else really needs to know about. Maybe nothing too severe you know? Just rough him up a little?

Well, I posit that we have seen this last week just how and where this line of thinking ends.
With the possible exception of Datuk Seri Sharizat Abdul Jalil, who seems to think once again that this is all the parents fault, everyone is disgusted at the shooting of Aminulrasyid Amzah.

John Lee and I have literally put together a whole book on the subject of police brutality, and I think for me to continue such a critique here would be to flog a near dead horse.

I hope today to discuss public attitudes instead.

Everyone hates crime. I hate crime. An attack by snatch thieves left my mom immobile for days, and traumatised for much longer.

A lot of us want revenge. Inspired perhaps by movies like “Taken”, where Liam Neeson “heroically” puts a bullet in the head of dozens of men who stand between him and his daughter, we want to see an eye for an eye type of justice.

It’s an understandable sentiment, it really is; but we have to go beyond it.

The simple truth is the minute we start sliding down that slippery slope of “it's OK to rough up the ‘real’ bad guys just a little bit”, it won’t be long until we create the type of police force that shoots and kills unarmed 14-year-olds.

Can we say the signs weren’t there?

I have this feeling the Hindraf gang will ask why no one kicked up a fuss with the near hundreds of cases of Indians being victims of extrajudicial killings — most of them shot in the same way Aminulrasyid was?

No one likes racial thinking either, but the facts in such a contention remain. No one can deny that our police force has a reputation (among those who care and pay attention at least) for being a little trigger happy.

As recently as in Hulu Selangor, a victim of police shooting — whose experience is remarkably similar to Aminulrasyid’s and the other person in the car with him — was trying to seek justice from BN politicians too busy peddling promises and bribes.

Norizan Salleh — a slightly built single mother — said that in October last year in Segambut, similar to Aminulrasyid and his companion, the car she was in was shot at and pushed off the road. She was then dragged out of the car, kicked and beaten, after already being hit five times by gunfire. Unlike Aminulrasyid, she managed to escape with her life.

Perhaps if we Malaysians made enough noise about Norizan’s case, it may have given the cops who shot Aminulrasyid a little pause for thought before they did a near re-enactment of Norizan’s scene in Shah Alam, fired at will and took away that young boy's life.

I wish I could say for sure that had I been there that day, I might have tried to stop those cybercafe patrons from beating that robber; but I don't know if I would have had the guts.

If I had — if we had — that kind of guts, maybe we can save the lives of the next few Aminulrasyids, Kugans and Teoh Beng Hocks.

Nathaniel Tan believes this world is full of people, he was born to love them all. He blogs at www.jelas.info

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

Malaysian Insider: Politics and the death of a schoolboy--John Lee

Politics and the death of a schoolboy--John Lee

Malaysian Insider, APRIL 30 —

Aminulrasyid  Amzah is barely buried, and already the political knives are out, with both Umno and Pakatan Rakyat clamouring for the right to champion justice for him and his family. Naturally, the ostensibly non-partisan folk are coming out of the woodwork to sternly warn against “politicising” the death of this 14-year-old boy.

That, frankly, is a load of steaming cow crap. As ugly as politics is, there are far worse things for political parties to fight over than being the flag-bearer for justice.

Really, who do the police answer to anyway? The answer is simple: they answer to politicians. And for this reason, when you have cops gunning down 14-year-old boys, you can bet your butt it’s going to be a political issue.

One might be tempted to ask why we cannot sit back and let the government handle the issue. Why does the death of an, as far as we know, innocent boy have to become a political football? Because unless someone keeps the authorities on their toes, this case — like so many before it — will wind up as just a historical footnote.

How many people remember Francis Udayappan? The police claimed he escaped from their custody — even though the charges against him were already withdrawn, and he was due to be released. They claimed he jumped into the Klang River to escape, even though he couldn’t swim.

When his body was recovered, there were bruises on his legs, thighs and back. The police were outright hostile to his mother’s inquiries, and the government could not care less about his case. Even though the police contradicted their own version of events several times, the courts declared that there was no reason to suspect foul play in Francis’ death.

What about Kugan Ananthan? The police tell us he asked for a drink of water during questioning and then suddenly keeled over, completely dead — a fishy story, if I’ve ever heard one. His body was clearly bloodied and battered when his family claimed it from the morgue — and yet it took an official Health Ministry report, after much prodding and pushing, for the authorities to concede that yes, Kugan was tortured.

Even after this, the authorities have been unco-operative in investigations about Kugan’s death — to the point that they even confiscated medical samples just to prevent his post-mortem from being completed. It took a court order to force the cops to co-operate.

Now in the case of Aminulrasyid, the police claim he was trying to reverse his car into the officers pursuing him, so they had no choice but to fire. They say he had a parang in the car, which they suspected he had used in a robbery. What proof do they have of any of this?

Lest people forget, the police said Kugan was under investigation for carjackings or robberies. A lot of people immediately concluded he was a criminal (as if somehow torture or the death penalty is an acceptable sentence for car theft).

What not many realise is that the police recently told Kugan’s family they could not find any evidence at all that Kugan was complicit in any car thefts. Now the police expect us to believe a 14-year-old student is a hardened criminal?

As always, we get the same old promises from the government that Aminulrasyid will get justice — even though the authorities have fought tooth and nail to prevent cases like Kugan’s and Francis’ from ever coming before a court.

Nat Tan and I edited “Where Is Justice”, a book on custodial deaths, and the Home Ministry has simply swept it off the shelves —  because apparently scrutiny is a threat to national security. How can we trust the government to uphold its promises, when it has consistently refused to take the cause of justice seriously?

If the government won’t come down hard on the people responsible for these deaths, who is going to hold it accountable? There is no other option but the political process. Somebody needs to tell the law minister and the home minister to get their act together, because when it comes to investigating suspicious deaths, the government is clearly not meeting its KPIs.

There is no worse abuse of power than murder. Corruption is one thing, but it seems that the authorities do not even take human life seriously — and that is unconscionable. The police cannot be judge, jury and executioner. The government cannot sit idly back and promise more “investigations” that go nowhere.

When we have innocent men dying in police stations, and young boys being shot on our streets, something has gone terribly wrong — and we owe it to these innocent people to demand justice from our government.

John Lee is a third-year student of economics at Dartmouth College in the United States. He has been thinking aloud since 2005 at infernalramblings.com.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.