W

hen Indonesian police killed six suspected terrorists in Ciputat in South Tangerang city on New Year'€™s Eve, it brought to 21 the number killed in police operations in 2013. Even if the suspects were armed and dangerous, Indonesians are justified in asking why the death toll is so high, whether enough effort is being made to capture suspects alive and whether '€œstandard procedures'€ in these situations need to be changed.

It is not a coincidence that all but one of the victims of terrorism since the 2009 hotel bombings have been police: 10 officers in 2010, three in 2011, eight in 2012 and three in 2013. Only one of them, First Brig. Boas Wasiri, was engaged in counter-terrorism at the time he was killed, pursuing fugitives from the Aceh training camp in February 2010. All the rest were regular police who were shot '€” and in one case stabbed and hacked '€” in apparent retaliation for the deaths and arrests of self-styled mujahidin.

This may have engendered an attitude of '€œkill or be killed'€ on the part of police, but it has also produced a vicious cycle in which police killings of suspects have become a factor in radicalization. The finer points of salafi jihadi ideology may not be well understood by the current crop of poorly trained extremists, but no sophistication is required for revenge. Now Indonesians are asking whether avenging slain colleagues may also be a factor in the police response.

As played out over television, the New Year'€™s Eve operation in Ciputat brought back memories of the 2009 Temanggung, Central Java siege where police shot untold rounds of ammunition at the house where Noordin M. Top was thought to be hiding. Standard procedures may authorize the police to use force when suspects refuse calls to surrender and put up resistance, but that does not mean that the only recourse is to shoot until no one is left alive.

In most other democracies, after an operation of this scale, there would be a serious forensic examination of the house to see how many bullets had been fired and by whom. The one policeman injured apparently was hit by a bullet from a homemade pen gun fired by a member of the group who had left the house on his motorcycle to get food. He was immediately shot and killed.

But how much firing was actually coming from inside the house? A full post-operation investigation would bring this to light, in a way that could generate discussions about the proportionality of the response and what might be done differently. It could also help identify future training needs.

The police were unquestionably at risk in confronting men believed to be active shooters, some of whom perhaps were seeking martyrdom, but this does not mean that the police version of the incident should be accepted without question.

The fact is that this group '€” a splinter of a splinter of an old Darul Islam network that fragmented after the July 2011 arrest of its leader, Abu Umar '€” was not very competent, their attacks on police notwithstanding. They had none of the expertise, training or experience of Noordin M. Top, Dr. Azhari Husin or Umar Patek. None of the bombs they made worked; the explosion at the Vihara Ekayana in Jakarta in August terrified Buddhist worshipers but did not even leave much of a mark on the floor.

In many ways they resemble petty criminals more than the image we have of terrorists as mass killers. Was there no way the police could have kept the house surrounded and used tear gas or a stun grenade or means other than assault rifles to force them out of the house?

No police agency in the world likes to be second-guessed, and the tendency in most internal assessments is to conclude that officers had no option other than to act in the way they did. Last June, a reporter for the New York Times looked into internal FBI evaluations of 150 shootings, 70 of them fatal, that its officers were involved in between 1993 and 2011, and there was not a single one in which the officers were found to be at fault. The problem of trying to get at the facts in operations of this kind is thus not unique to Indonesia.

Asking critical questions is not to denigrate the police or to downplay the dangers they face. But we do need answers.

In the past, Indonesian police were accused of treating terrorists too leniently. Now they may have gone too far in the other direction. They are not just losing valuable intelligence. They are risking the loss of public support for counter-terrorism efforts and putting in jeopardy their own reputation for professionalism and commitment to the
rule of law.