Who Do You Trust?

This video is a fascinating documentation of how our vaunted Home Team members earn their pay. Firstly, they seem to like to go about their task incognito. They are obviously not proud of their smart tailored uniforms - recall the officer at Little India who was dressed down for showing up on duty without proper police attire. More revealing, their "warrant card" is just a mugshot, with no embossed name or identification number. Yang Yin will have a field day posing as a bogus officer. Even his name card provides more details, director of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry (fake), graduate of University of Financial and Trade Beijing China (fake), director of Young Music & Dance Studio Pte Ltd (2 employee company?), etc.

And then there's this ominous drone of a threat by NParks director Chia Seng Jiang to "take down your particulars", repeated ad finitum in the close encounter with the boys in mufti. Obedient Singaporeans usually produce their NRIC or driver's licence upon polite request; not some cheap printed name card like the one flashed by Yang Yin.

The article in TIME magazine ("Who Do You Trust", 6 Oct 2014) says police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, now wear a body camera after the unfortunate shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. The intention was to increase transparency of encounters with the public, and with it, earn trust in the police reaction. A study in the Los Angeles suburb of Rialto found that the camera significantly reduced  the incidence of  police  violence and the number of brutality complaints. Singapore Police Commissioner Ng Joo Hee also asked for body cameras in the wake of the Little India riot, but whether he shares the same aim of transparency is hard to fathom.

Interestingly, police are not the only ones suitably geared. Some Ferguson residents are now wearing a camera provided by We Copwatch, a group that raised US$6,000 on the Internet to provide them with cameras of their own. "If Ferguson police are going to video tape us, we're going to video tape them right back," said citizen Whitt, who posted his first contribution to YouTube.

Your smartphone has a built-in digital camera. Don't leave home without it, when you set out for a nice stroll in Hong Lim Park. Or any street in Singapore for that matter.