Mr. Policeman

Today’s entry is inspired by this article from “The Nut Graph”: Trusting the Police.

This was what happened to my car when it got hit by two “Mat Rempits” who luckily didn’t smash up any other part of my car. They saw me staring at them and then quickly sped away. I must've looked very scary to them.

The backside portion of the car

It’s not exactly that obvious if I didn’t tell anyone about it. My creative friend said the blue-black smudges looked pretty artistic, so I didn’t get the car repainted until now. Those wild streaks of colours must've reminded her of some form of weird abstract art…

Example of an abstract art painting

Knowing very well that no action will be taken against those two boys who rode that blue Yamaha with the numbers “X44”, I still decided to make a police report anyway. I drove to the nearest Nilai police station and waited for almost 20 minutes before making my report because there was another person making his report when I arrived.

It was a very warm afternoon. The office was musty and the atmosphere was gloomy. I was the only girl at the police station. I made my report; the policeman at the desk took down my report and typed out the report v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y on the computer.

Once the report was done, the policeman printed out the report for me. And then he said something that totally made my mind stop working and heart stop beating for about two seconds: “Actually, that area where the accident took place was at Sepang. You are in Nilai area. You should actually make your report at the Sepang police station…”

OKAAAAYYYYYY… So since it was the weekend and I had too much time to kill, I drove to the Sepang police station.

It’s a long winding road

I walked into the office and saw a middle-aged man lying down on the couch (we shall call him “couch-guy”). He was munching on something (presumably food).

So I told the couch-guy that I wanted to make a report because two boys damaged my car with a motorbike.

Couch-guy could've probably thought, “Astaga, small matter like that also want to report??”

Anyway, I walked to the counter and a policewoman took down my report. She typed out my report on the computer letter by letter… using two stubby fingers… from her two hands… despite the fact she has EIGHT other fingers.

Couch-guy asked me for the motorcycle registration number. He checked the number from the online database system and immediately got the owner’s profile. Now why couldn’t they do this with the police reporting system so I didn’t have to drive from Nilai to Sepang just to make that one-page police report all over again?

After printing out my report, another policeman took out a big SLR camera to take a picture of the artistic blue-black portion of my car.

Soon after the photo-taking session, I drove out from the police station. That incident reminded me of a casual phone conversation my former colleague once had with one of her friends from the police force…

Former Colleague (FC): Hello, friend. How are you? Can you help me check if I have any police summonses to clear up? I’ll give you my car registration number- ABC 1234.

Police Friend (PF): OK. Checked already. No summonses.

FC: Can you help me check another registration number? My friend’s car- XYZ 4321.

PF: OK. Your friend has two summonses yet to be settled…

It perplexes me as to how simple and convenient it is for traffic summonses to be checked, but so extremely difficult for any normal citizen to make a simple police report.

While typing out this entry, I decided to check out how the Royal Malaysian Police website looks like.

Royal Malaysian Police homepage

Wooowwww! Better than Kenny Sia’s website! Better than many other corporate and higher education institution websites too. Seriously, no joke. It takes a lot of effort to come up with such extensive website content, inclusive of time-consuming content management and archiving. Its online makeup and layout are impressive, I must say. And now that I’ve told you about it, you’re all gonna go visit that website, aren’t you?

There’s also a category that shows you pictures of a few of the most wanted people in Malaysia. They’re mostly Chinese. Gosh, I’m so proud of my own people…

Then I decided to see what they’ve got in Wikipedia. One sentence caught my attention:

The RMP, in 2006, surpassed the Interpol crime solving standards.^{[citation needed]}

Note the “citation needed” clause in the sentence above. I’ve included the page diagram here in case someone edits that article and that cute Interpol sentence mysteriously disappears in the mists of time.

Click onto picture to view that cute Interpol sentence.

The Malay language version in Wikipedia can be found here.

Other pictures found from those two Wikipedia pages:

Picture above- a photo with the confusing caption: "Female traffic police officers during Independence Day". I think they're also referring to the ones in black clothes. Undercover cops, maybe... *lame*

Uber-hunky policemen in Darth Vader clothes

Cool-looking female police officers

Photos from Wikipedia portray the policemen as being hunky and well-built whereas the policewomen, slim and tough-looking, unlike all those ponderous, horizontally-challenged ones I saw at Nilai and Sepang. I'm using BIG WORDS such as "ponderous" so that any policeman reading this might not understand me :-D

Those powerful marketing tools in the form of photos from those websites I visited could easily make me and any foreigner suddenly think that our policemen here are as uber-cool as the parkour-loving guy from the YouTube video below…

Polis Diraja Malaysia (Royal Malaysian Police)

Motto: Tegas, Adil & Berhemah (Firm, Fair & Prudent)

The power of marketing... amazing...

* A similarly-themed blog entry such as this one will be made public by year-end... the most sordid form of customer experience that no other sane human being should go through ever again.