Malaysia Cellphone video captures police excess

Global Voices is exploring the ways cellphones are used in human rights documentation. You can Watch and comment on human rights video from around the world curated by WITNESS. (Picture left: a corporal punishment - a caning n Malaysia).

According to this article, "when the Malaysian police started accepting crime reports sent in by members of the public from their cellphones, little did they expect that their own misdemeanours would one day be caught in the frame.

Malaysians have had to put up with police corruption and misconduct as a part of everyday life. But now blogs and video cellphones have given Malaysians who are exasperated by the lack of action against the police a new and very public outlet.

A new Malaysian blog - Polis Raja Di Malaysia (or “Royal Malaysian Police”) - aims to pull together footage documenting police misconduct from video-sharing sites like YouTube and GoogleVideo.

The blog promotes itself with the strapline “Police should fight crime, not fight the people”. Cellphone videos on YouTube range, for example, from footage and photomontages of the police breaking up protests to a police officer firing into the air unprovoked while breaking up a fight.

One recent video that hasn’t made it onto Polis Raja Di Malaysia yet, but has been on other blogs, appears to show police officers beating and humiliating two youths in a police cell. It has caused controversy in Malaysia and human rights organisation Suaram calls it “the tip of the iceberg”.

The video, which shows a youth being forced to lick his saliva off the floor, was apparently filmed by one of the police officers on his cellphone, and only came to light when he sent the phone in for repairs. A technician uploaded the clip onto the internet, and one viewer sent it in to Malaysia TV3’s Utama Bulletin news programme, which aired it last week.

It’s just one of many alleged cases of police brutality that remain either uninvestigated or unpunished, and this one has only stoked up a controversy because video evidence surfaced - in this case, unwittingly released by the police officer himself. As a result, it seems that Malaysian police officers are now banned from carrying cameraphones".

Related: Capturing Human Rights Abuse

emily | 9:11 AM | Citizens as Camera Phone Reporters |
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/2006/09/013489.htm