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Subject: Police's legalistically passing duties back to
citizens?
From: Robert Teh
To Editor Today
Dear Editor,
There seems to be increasingly frequent incidents where private
citizens
were blatantly assaulted by another but the police merely concluded
the
whole episode by saying that such incidents were of private nature
and it is
up to the victims to seek his own recourse like commencing his own
private
summons against the perpetrators.
Is the police aware in such an encounter, there may be more than
meet the
eyes with perpetrators likely to take advantage of such a hands-off
approach
to increase their aggressions everywhere?
From reported cases it is clear that the police has been able to
rely on
"seizable" or "non-seizable"; categorisation of offences in order
to deny
responsibilities for more in-depth investigation and prevention of
crimes of
any kind against persons of more private or civil nature by telling
the
victim to commence his own private civil suits.
Yet citizens need the police to use its special power to intervene
where
such private trespass against persons are more serious in nature
like openly
blatant assault. Without such intervention, there will be a
tendency for
citizens to take laws into their own hands to settle private feuds.
So will
the police understand such a intricate balance of relationship and
factors
in seeking to deny responsibilities for commissions of offences
against the
person.
If we allow the police to adopt this lower standard of policing
then almost
every case of assault no matter how unprovoked will become private
suits
just because the police may then take short cut to avoid their
duties and
responsibilities.
There seems to be a tendency to rely on legalistic wrangling of
laws and
regulations to pass relevant duties to citizens. For example, the
police has
passed amendments to Immigration Act or regulations using the
terrorisms or
illegal immigration as an excuse to make landladies and landlords
liable to
be jailed for illegal harbouring of illegal when clearly such are
the duties
of the police and not the citizens who at best could only exercise
caution.
The police who allowed criminal like Took Leng How to escape
immigration
control is not even reprimanded.
Police has also passed many duties now to the Management
Corporations of
private estates by relying entirely on private security agencies to
do
policing. It has been resorting to canceling licences of security
agencies
for breach of standards whereas when their own policemen do not
even bother
to patrol the surrounding more diligently, there is no penalty or
acceptance
of responsibilities.
