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Twitter hashtag #PercumaLaporPolisi spells PR disaster for Indonesian police
Police officials have scrambled to counter the viral hashtag #PercumaLaporPolisi (no use going to the police) that has sent the law enforcement institution into one of its worst PR crises in recent years.
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Abandoned: An illustration of the sexual abuse in East Luwu, South Sulawesi. (Project M/Muhammad Nauval Firdaus - under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 license) (Project Multatuli page/Courtesy of Project Multatuli)
T
he National Police have struggled with a public relations (PR) problem for so long that two recent police chiefs—Gen. Tito Karnavian and the incumbent Gen. Listyo Sigit Prabowo—chose to make it a personal crusade to change the public perception of the force.
The negative image of the police was so baked into society that in the early 1990s the legendary metal band Rotor released a song called “Pluit Phobia” (Whistle Phobia) to describe the police’s tendency to instil a sense of fear rather than security.
Nearly three decades after the song was released, and despite numerous efforts by Tito and Listyo to improve their image, the police are still facing the same problem.
In the past few days, police officials have scrambled to counter the viral hashtag #PercumaLaporPolisi (no use going to the police) that has sent the law enforcement institution into one of its worst PR crises in recent years.
The hashtag, which has set off a trend among internet users of telling stories of the bad experience they have had when dealing with the police, went viral after alternative media platform Project Multatuli published a story casting a bad light on the force.
The story follows a mother in East Luwu, South Sulawesi, who claimed to have reported her ex-husband to the local police for allegedly sexually abusing her children, but the police decided to drop her case citing a lack of evidence.
