Sabah retired cops also not in favour of IPCMC Bill
Published on: Tuesday, November 12, 2019
By: Sherell Jeffrey
KOTA KINABALU: Retired Senior Police Officers’ Association (Respa) Sabah reiterates the stand by their counterparts at Federal of being not in favour of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) Bill.
Respa Sabah Secretary, Kasim Salleh (pic), said this when expressing his views during a public hearing by Special Select Committee tasked with looking into the draft legislation, here, Sunday.
ADVERTISEMENT
He said the IPCMC is a disciplinary proceeding, thus the need to be humanitarian as oppose to being cruel and brutal in the approach.
“We are not handling criminals and it is because maybe mistakes or omission as oppose to offence of criminal nature, even in handling criminal cases, I believe the police are tactful, they do not use an approach that goes beyond bounds,” he said.
He said disciplinary control as according to the Constitution under Article 140 of the Federal Constitution, the power is given to the Police Commission (SPP), which includes exercise of disciplinary control.
“If we look at the IPCMC Bill, we are treating as though we have an axe to grind against police, so please reconsider the act as a whole, whether it is efficient to the public at large as opposed to satisfy certain quarters,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Coming back to the Constitution, while citing SPP, he said they (SPP) should be given more power, extra members of the committee to foresee discipline and extra backup staff.
“We need to frugal and prudent in our standing, why not use the extra money to assist police welfare, logistic, housing, and maybe extra allowance,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
He said the provision for disciplinary control is there, what needs to be done is to improve it.
“We don’t need to have a new committee, we don’t need to have a new office, we don’t need to have new backup staff, all this cost money, and uses public and tax payers’ money.
“The SPP is in my view is sufficient, adequate and up to the mark in handling disciplinary control,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ramkarpal Singh, who is chairman of the Special Select Committee noted that Respa is the only party who has expressly stated that they are not in favour of the IPCMC.
“We appreciate their views, they have given their reasons,” he said in his address at the public hearing.
“In my view, my question is, can the Bill be improved to be accepted because I think the underlying objective of this Bill is to overcome misconduct and there have been complains of misconduct.
“By misconduct I don’t mean only high profile cases, I also mean day-to-day abuses and that I think does happen, such as threats when taking confessions and so on, this things do happen and it is quite evident that they do happen when courts very frequently throw out this confessions on grounds of duress and so on,” he said.
“So can the Bill be improved to improve the quality of the force,” he said.
At one point during the public hearing, he also noted that the IPCMC does have shortcomings.
“There is no doubt about that, thus we appreciate your views on the shortcomings, but how or can we improve it to make it more acceptable to the police as well,” he said.
Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
Daily Express Malaysia
