A recent incident in which the police engaged in a fierce war of narratives with a fledgling alternative media platform over a report that portrays the law enforcement institution in a bad light only shows that little has changed after years of reform. In fact, the expansion of cyberspace and the growing presence of cyberpolice only make things worse.

The ruckus centers on a report by Project Multatuli, which follows the plight of a mother who claims to have reported her ex-husband for allegedly sexually abusing her children to the police, only to be dismissed as “schizophrenic”. The report was released with the hashtag #PercumaLaporPolisi (#nousegoingtothepolice), which became a trending topic.

Regardless of the way the police are handling the sexual abuse case in Luwu Timur regency, South Sulawesi, which critics say is rife with irregularities, we are deeply concerned by the law enforcement agency’s failure to spot the ironies in how they are dealing with the whole controversy.

One reason why the Project Multatuli report became so viral is that within hours after it was published, its website became a target of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that rendered it inaccessible. The cyberattack triggered a massive solidarity movement from other online media outlets that decided to republish the report.

The police should have known that the cyberattack on Project Multatuli was an assault on press freedom; it was, by default, an attack on all online media platforms. Alas, the public journalism initiative is not the first — and certainly will not be the last — media outlet to be targeted by cowardly, hit-and-run assaults of unidentified digital ghouls.

The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) has recorded at least 14 digital attacks on the media between 2020 and 2021, with mainstream outlets such as tempo.co and tirto.id and independent outlets such as konde.co and magdalene.co among the prey.   

There is no way the media can normalize such attacks as nothing but a digital fact of life. The cyberpolice should have known that DDoS attacks are a crime in many countries, including Indonesia. It is a felony under articles 30, 32 and 33 of the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law, which the police have ironically used to send people to jail just for expressing their opinions on digital platforms.

It is thus baffling that the police — who are expected to make cyberspace a safe place for all, including the press — have instead chosen to delegitimize Project Multatuli by labeling its report as a “hoax” and spoken nothing about the attack on the media outlet.

It is perhaps unsurprising that not a single high-profile case of digital attacks on journalists and activists has been solved by the police, despite the recent expansion of its cybercrimes division, which includes the establishment of the so-called “virtual police”.

There is no question the public must stand behind the police, but for that to happen, they must work harder to make the hashtag #PercumaLaporPolisi a thing of the past.