For quite a protracted period now, our Malaysian police force has found itself in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar position of being cast into the limelight, and scrutinised under the public microscope of the media.

This is an entirely new phenomenon in Malaysia of course. The police have always been the foremost law enforcement agency in the nation. Their ubiquitous presence is synonymous with law and order in a young and sometimes volatile democracy.

Over half a century of independence later, they have evolved into one of those institutions resembling the Holy Cow in India. Any reproach or direct open criticism against the police is tantamount to an act of subversion against their sanctimonious contribution towards the peace and stability of a multiracial society seething with tension beneath our veneer of racial harmony.

The prestige and power of the Malaysian police can be traced back to the difficult labour pain of our nation's birth.

The period immediately before and after independence was a time of political turmoil and economic deprivation. South East Asia as a whole then, was a rowdy cockpit of bloody conflicts, a strategic corner of the grand international chessboard on which the communist dictatorial East was pitted against the capitalist imperialist West in a relentless Cold War.

The overriding concern of our founding fathers was the very survival of this new tiny nation state facing both external threat and internal insurgency. All the Declarations of Emergency and their related laws, as well as legislations giving sweeping ultra-constitutional police powers were instituted at that time.

Courageous and proud lot

It was a different time, and a different country for that matter. Despite the obvious risks involved, many of those who joined the police force then looked upon their job as a vocation. Serving King-and-Country meant something.

They were the guardians of the nation and her people, very much those guardians in Plato's Republic. For the Malays, their self-image was probably and invariably formed by the memory of Hang Tuah. They were a courageous, proud, and disciplined lot.

A policeman, especially if he was ranked inspector and above, enjoyed high standing in the community, alongside the teacher and the religious cleric. (That was the time before the corporate tycoons and the high-flying business executives of course!) In my childhood, the gangsters were terrified of the police. And if a child wailed uncontrollably, all that the parents needed to do to silence the little brat was the warning that the "Mata" was coming. Those were the good old days for the veterans in the force.

Alas! Time has changed.

Over the past four or five decades, the decline of the prestige enjoyed by the police has been slow but certain. Political stability, socio-economic development, and impressive economic growth have combined to give birth to an urban middle-class of various races. By and large, the new Malaysians tend to be better educated and better paid than your suffering officers and men in blue. The cream of the crop tends to aspire to a life of self-actualisation and financial security in the private sector, rather than the strait jacket in the civil service, of which the police is an integral part.

The remuneration scheme and welfare programme of the police have not improved that much really. (I have met constables and non-commissioned officers living in squatter areas because they could not afford to pay rent in housing estates.)

Cannot attract the best

Given the current situation with unemployment and under-employment, there is no shortage of new recruits to the force. But it does mean that a career in uniform can no longer attract the best of Malaysian new blood churned out by our educational system. In the popular belief of parents across the land, perhaps only those who cannot do, will either teach or join the police force. That professionalism should suffer across the board is only to be expected.

The burgeoning wealth enjoyed by those in the private sector has perhaps generated a whole new ambience of greed and envy. The standard has been set by the politico-corporate elite of the country in the past few decades. Any nobody can become a corporate magnate overnight, metaphorically speaking; all he needs is political connections. Much more than the politicians and the pop stars, these new moguls have become superstars on our Malaysian scene.

Irrespective of rank and importance, policemen are ordinary citizens also, with their usual hope and fear, love and hate. They watch the coming and going in the public sphere as we do, and share the legends, the rumours and the gossips, and the cynicism as we do.

One message that has been absorbed by them, as it is absorbed by all those in the civil service is this: from example set at the top, it is alright to feather your own nests with the power that you have, as long as you are not caught. It is all justifiable, because everybody has to "cari makan" and look after his family When justice and ethics have been thwarted and distorted at the highest level in public life, greed and selfishness spread like a wild fire throughout the body politics.

Unlike the other branches of the civil service, the police also sit atop a gold mine. They are supposed to control crime. But with increasing affluence, the underworld sector has also grown, to a multi-billion ringgit alternative economy in prostitution, gambling, drug and human trafficking, and loan sharking, Anyone who wishes to know the extent of police corruption needs only to ask those kingpins in the world of secret money. They, needless to say, will not snitch.

There are other factors that erode and corrode the moral authority of the police force of course. Once the threat from communist insurgency and external aggression has been removed, the police have been used to quell internal dissent of all sorts, including legitimate and legal political activism.

It was no longer a case of Malay warriors guarding their homeland against Chinese terrorists. The 1998 Reformasi must have shaken many a policeman to the core of their being. The putative impartiality of the police in upholding law and order has been subverted by political intrigues motivated by the partisan Machiavellian political self-interests. The infamous black eye incident was the culmination of this loss of direction.

Two royal commissions

The cumulative effect of decades of decline is this: the police - as an institution are now suffering from a crisis of public trust and moral authority in the proper discharge of their functions.

That two Royal Commissions of Enquiry established in the past year bear testimony to public recognition for a radical reform in the philosophy and modus operandi of policing in Malaysia.

Middle class Malaysians are more prosperous and much more aware than before. They may not care about human rights in the larger picture, or be concerned with the oppression and marginalisation of the voiceless and the dispossessed. But they would tend to be more vocal when it comes to thee dignity of their person, and the sanctity of their property ownership and their money.

Indeed the world is turning topsy-turvy in this brave new age, and Malaysia is no exception. Even crimes have evolved into high-tech sophistication. In sticking to old modality of thought and tired procedures, the police have shown themselves to be a little exhausted, and much out of sync with rapidly changing reality.

Of course the officers and men in the force resent this public probing into what they consider to be their privileged, and often secretive but noble domain of fighting crimes. Their resistance to change and their opposition to the many radical recommendations tabled by the Royal Commissions of Enquiry are merely human responses.

But they miss the point if they merely feel persecuted unjustly from what they consider to be a frenzy of public police bashing.

What they miss is that Malaysians, by and large, still value and cherish the police, as those familiar with similar situations in some neighbouring countries will testify. When in real trouble with crimes, the public still turn to our policemen for assistance, in the entrenched belief that this is the right thing to do, rather than taking the law into their own hands.

Community-friendly department

If they voice their criticism against some police actions, it is done out of the positive concern for the police to reinvent their identity, and to rebuild their moral authority to use that violence of the state with wisdom, intelligence, honesty, and effectiveness.

After all, the police force is not a law unto itself, and neither do they operate in a vacuum. They come from the community, and they work in the community to serve the community. The time has come for the top cops to realise that they cannot reform themselves without the active support and direct input from the community. That the Rakan Cop project has been successful in solving crimes is ample evidence for the need for a community-friendly police department.

Therefore, when the IGP announced that there would not be an external Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC), as recommended by the two Royal Commissions, and against the publicly expressed intension of the PM, he is merely trying to stall the tide of the times.

Unfortunately, the perception that the PM is ineffectual in institutional reform in Malaysia has been confirmed. People will be more cynical still if another Royal Commission of Enquiry is set up in the future.

Meanwhile, we continue to read frequent reports of police misconduct in the press by those supposedly "few bad apples" among the police. We know in our heart that the problem is not with a few rotten apples only, but it has its roots in the apple tree itself. It has not grown properly with changing times.