I’m always aware of my surroundings when I go around town, and doubly so when I’m about to withdraw money. I’m a relatively fit guy, so I know I’m less of a target but these days you never know.
Everyone has a few stories about someone who was slashed or stabbed over a wallet or phone. With my fractured thumb in a splint (long story), I can’t help but feel vulnerable.
Even though it is sunny out at 3pm on a Saturday, the Public Bank branch at Damasara Jaya can be quite intimidating. The bank itself is closed and there is no security guard. With the construction going on at what-once-was-Atria, the 8ft high hoarding has transformed the road into a narrow alley where anything can happen with very few witnesses.
Carefully I enter the lorong, prepared for anything. Then I saw two foreign workers. Not the over-paid expatriate kind either. One look and you know these guys are construction workers, perhaps on their day off. They were probably in their thirties, average height and kind of skinny. Old, oversized dust and sweat stained shirts. If I had to take a guess, I had to say the men were from Bangladesh.
There is only one uncle in the ATM area withdrawing money, oblivious to what is about to happen behind him. I step into the nice air-conditioned fish tank, and take another look outside.
And all I could do was watch a crime unfold.
“Your plastic bag of groceries looks suspicious. You’re going to have to come in.”
“Look over there! Real crime!”
Thinly disguised plot twist! This policeman pulls up next to them winds down the window and starts asking them a whole bunch of questions, in Malay. These poor chaps, with their basic understanding of Bahasa try to gesture where they were heading. As far as I can tell, these guys simply have some groceries in a plastic bag.
The lone officer in the squad car opens the door, cigarette in hand and sunglasses on. He sits half in and half out of the car clearly establishing his dominance by displaying his weapon and his pelvis.
One by one the foreign workers show him their ID cards. With a cigarette hanging from his lips (very cool) he glances over their ID’s and continues to question them.
Then he notices me trying to take pictures from the safety of the bank. He orders the two foreign workers into the back of his squad car as I start to leave the bank.
As soon as they get in, he hits the gas and makes a quick getaway. He is in such a hurry that the rear passenger door was not closed yet.
It clips a parked car I front of the bank and slams shut. The white squad car rounds the corner and disappears. Everything happens in less than a minute and all I can say is I wish I managed to take a video.
Instead, while I try to work my phone’s camera, I fumble around trying to transfer the bulk of my money into a different pocket. So I wouldn’t have too much in my wallet. You know, just in case la…
Maybe next time I’ll be braver. A guy I know once filmed the cops extorting money from foreign workers in KL and caught it on camera. He then confronted the cops with the video and forced them to return the money. He even made the cops apologize!
We can only speculate what transpired between that cop and those two foreign workers, but I can say for sure it does help but tarnish the image of the police force at a time when their reputation is at an all time low.
Of course, no action can be taken without the cop’s name and number. But this isn’t just one cop. The problem is much bigger than this one cowboy.
Its not an uncommon sight to see police squad cars parked by the side of the road, as they carry out an ad-hoc interrogation of these foreign workers, and it is no wonder.
Foreign workers typically carry all their valuables on them because their accommodations are not secure. This makes them easy targets for the police.
I wonder who would go looking for these two men if they were detained in lock-up. It must be quite frightful being in their shoes.
The worst thing is the typical “shrug, it happens” attitude.
Some might argue that the police have every right to crack down on foreign workers, that they should be caught and deported. But with over 2 million illegal foreign workers in the country, catching them one by one clearly isn’t feasible. Not to mention, all the country’s construction sites and plantations would grind to a halt. No one would cook our food and serve it.
Illegal workers are a symptom of policy failure, and need to be addressed with the right policies. Not heavy handed policing with racial profiling.
After all, I’d be pretty pissed off if I was routinely stopped and screened for legal documents in a foreign country.
shortsandslippers 