TheJakartaPost
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Policing monopoly: Serving and protecting whom?
Most good drivers yield to a police car speeding its way along the country's roads, lights blazing and siren blaring, and even to nonofficial vehicles with a police escort. But are they really serving and protecting the public?
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A police car is parked near a row of shop houses in Pamulang, South Tangerang, in this file photograph dated March 10, 2010. (AFP/Bay Ismoyo)
O
ne minor inconvenience that is common among urban residents around the world is that sometimes, we have to slow down, stop or pull over while driving to give way to emergency vehicles like ambulances, fire trucks and hearses.
In Greater Jakarta, we also must give way to official vehicles bearing the livery or the license plates of the National Police (Polri) and the Indonesian Military (TNI). As any person who regularly drives in the city knows, once these vehicles are headed their way, speeding with their deafening klaxons and blinding light bars, like it or not, everyone has to make way.
Oftentimes, even on the most congested thoroughfares, these vehicles zoom past the logjam, like the way Moses parted the Red Sea.
While we gaze after them in awe and wonder, we generally consider the disruption as nothing more than a slight inconvenience. If anything, we'd rather believe that the officers inside the speeding car are on some important mission: hunting down a fugitive, rushing to a crime scene or dashing to save lives in a road accident.
But several revelations from the National Police’s investigation into the murder of Brig. Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat have shown us that this is not always the case.
We now know that the police ambulance, vehicles carrying police detectives and other escort vehicles that traveled from the official residence of former internal affairs Insp. Gen. Ferdy Sambo in Duren Tiga, South Jakarta, to the National Police Hospital in Kramat Jati, East Jakarta, were in fact part of a cover-up.
It can also be speculated that the dozens of detectives who traveled to and from Sambo’s residence since June 9 could have been transporting some key pieces of evidence related to Yosua’s murder, including CCTV footage that were initially said to be missing during the preliminary investigation.
