Various parties have criticised the police for continuing to use Section 9(5) of the Peaceful Assembly Act (PAA), a law that the Appeals Court have deemed unconstitutional to arrest participants of #KitaLawan rallies.
Last Saturday, police secured a three-day remand order for activists Adam Adli and Mandeep Singh for participating in the weekly #KitaLawan rally to free jailed opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
The remand order was given because both Adam and Mandeep were considered a “flight risk”.
Since the #KitaLawan March 7 rally, nine protesters have been arrested. Apart from Adam and Mandeep, others who were arrested previously are DAP Youth chief Teo Kok Seong, PKR Youth chief Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli, Kelana Jaya PKR youth leader Saifullah Zulkifli, PAS youth treasurer Mohd Fakhrul Razi and Jingga 13’s Fariz Musa.
The recent arrests of protesters open up another debate – what is the inter-relation between political protest and protest policing?
Police had earlier allowed the #KitaLawan rally on March 7 to carry on smoothly, but began their “arrest spree” the next day.
The approach in which how the police handle political demonstrations is always controversial in this country.
A significant police presence, normally with intense visibility, has been observed at numerous protests at different occasions in Malaysia whenever the protests are anti-government in nature. In most of the cases, Federal Reserve Unit (FRU) police personnel with their shields were deployed along with huge intimidating trucks lining up.
That brings up to another question – the selectivity of police intervention.
For example, the first rally organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) in 2007 witnessed some 50,000 people in the city centre. The gathering eventually deteriorated into chaos when the police unleashed tear gas and water cannons on the protestors. Similar techniques were utilised in the subsequent Bersih rallies in 2011 and 2012.
Relations between police and protestors have been mixed. On the ground, some protestors have experienced neutral or positive interactions where some were sympathetic to the protestors. While some others have experienced excessive force by police.
The #KitaLawan rallies, like many other rallies, poses a great test for police with its two-fold responsibility – safeguarding civil rights while preserving civil order.
In 2011, a research carried out by Professor Jennifer Earl of the University of California found that while tactics of state-sponsored repression could possibly put an end to protests, however, there is also notable amount of research implying that repression can backfire and pave the way to greater scale protests.
In one incident during the Occupy protests in the United States, a UC Davis police officer became the target of condemnation where the picture of him pepper-spraying on the obviously peaceful seated protestors was made public. His action provoked justifiable indignation.
This is what happens when the authority is unaccountable and how structures could restrain a person’s logic.
Do police serve the general public, or are they an agency of elite control? The problem lies in the institutions.
Today, the regular protest strategies in the country have confirmed that a relatively small group of protestors on the streets can actually have a significant impact on politics. The fact is that very often, in many cases, police overreacted to what was a peaceful protest. – March 16, 2015.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider
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