Police waver between restraint and toughness

COMMENT After mulling - all of the last four weeks - what their response ought to be to the 'Black 505' rally at Padang Merbok today, the police appear to be wavering between acquiescence in the organisers' demand that the gathering not be impeded and aversion to the whole spectacle.

Benign acceptance by the police of the whole affair was indicated yesterday by Zainuddin Ahmad, the OCPD of Dang Wangi, who appeared to have given PKR's director of strategy Rafizi Ramli a signal of his contingent's intent to allow the gathering to take place unhindered, but in the end he hedged the signal with ambiguity.

However, there was no equivocation late yesterday by his boss. Kuala Lumpur Chief Police Officer Mohmad Salleh (left) not just confined himself to proscribing the whole gathering, he went a good deal further by imputing malevolent intent to its organisers in a statement he issued to the press.

Without tendering a shred of evidence to the effect, Salleh claimed the organisers harbour intent to stir participants to provoke the police into violent action against them.

He said the organisers wanted the whole world to witness what could then be passed off as police brutality, directed at seemingly harmless but gullible demonstrators.

In other words, a conspiratorial and evil-intending few would use gulls at the 'Black 505' gathering to stir the police into high dudgeon that would eventuate in harsh treatment meted out to all and sundry.

Unbridled statement by CPO

Never mind that in the last six years the three big gatherings organised by polls reform pressure group Bersih (on Nov 10, 2007, July 9, 2011 and April 28, 2012)), the one huge gathering put on by the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf, Nov 25, 2007), plus the mammoth 'People's Rising' gathering of last January - all had taken place in the city of Kuala Lumpur without any serious incident save the instances where the police themselves decided to react harshly, but KL CPO Salleh decided he would dabble in the imaginary rather than the real.

This he did by attributing evil intent to the organisers and gullibility to some participants in today's 'Black 505' gathering who, if the CPO is to be believed, would play by the script of a conspiratorial coterie by provoking police to attack ordinary citizens, engaged in what has come to be known, in the lexicon of human rights agitation, as 'symbolic speech'.

CPO Salleh, perhaps, did not intend it, but he has inadvertently given the forces pressing for the creation of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) an assist, simply by attributing malign intent to the ‘Black 505' organisers, where there is no prior or current proof of its presence while suggesting that the police are enforcers who are hard put to sift the malevolent from the mundane. This is the nub of the argument put forward by proponents of the IPCMC.

However, the unbridled statement by the CPO may turn out to be a pathetic and last-minute attempt to put fear into people intending to participate in today's gathering that they are in danger of being caught up in pitched battles between a forbearing force and evil-intentioned schemers out to blacken the good name of the force.

All is calm in the morning

On journey early this morning through the venue of the gathering, Padang Merbok, and areas fringing, it was notable for the conspicuous absence of the men in blue although the roads leading to Dataran Merdeka were cordoned off by Dewan Bandaraya (KL City Hall)-erected barricades rather than by police-marked ones.

It is a little too early to suggest that this no-show by the police would obtain for the rest of the day. But seven hours before the 'Black 505' gathering time at 2pm at Padang Merbok, the police are not in the mood to give teeth to the bluster that emanated from their head honcho in the city.

Or is it that the police have borrowed from the book of their seeming political masters who, because of a five-year absence of a parliamentary two-thirds majority now coupled with an unprecedented loss of the popular vote, only know how to deal with adversity through the use of force and, when that is no longer feasible, resort to the threat of its use.

This recession from demonstrably forceful - as distinct to rhetorically forceful - response to adversity only serves to underscore the fact of what today's 'Black 505' gathering is intended to convey: The Umno-BN government has lost the moral legitimacy to govern.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.