“There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.”

- Gore Vidal, ‘Death in the Fifth Position’

I have always enjoyed reading what writer Nathaniel Tan has on his mind, even though sometimes I disagree with him. While nearly every other political pundit - myself most definitely included - begun the year with the predictable rejoinders, warnings, and outrage pieces aimed at the usual suspects, Tan did something different.

He started of the year by reminding people that disenfranchised Malaysians were the primary victims of a corrupt system that nobody seems very interested in changing. Perhaps not many people are interested in what Tan wrote. There are too many other things going on in this country then having to worry about someone killed by officers of the state. Well, that sounded strange.

I wrote about this apathy before - “We may share their sense of outrage but our outrage is diluted with our disdain for the systemic corruption that permeates every level of government.

“Our outrage in some cases is also dependent on the guilt of the parties involved. We are indifferent to the fates of convicted inmates and the unsanitary (and most often criminally negligent) conditions they are housed in when it is the responsibility of the state to administer their welfare.

“Our parasitic relationship with ‘foreigners', legal or otherwise, does not leave much room for empathy when it comes to their welfare while in custody for whatever reasons.”

Last year, Mariam Mohktar was right to ask for the resignation of the police chief in her article about the N Dharmendran case. Not only was it a factual non-polemical piece, it also described the banal corruption that plagues the system that enables this callous disregard for human life.

Here’s Mariam questioning the excuse of the malfunctioning CCTV cameras that always crops up in cases like these - “Why are our government departments plagued with broken CCTVs? This ‘broken CCTV’ phenomenon was also found in Teoh Beng Hock’s and Ahmad Sarbani’s deaths.

“Why has the auditor-general not addressed the never-ending problem of malfunctioning CCTVs in government departments? CCTVs, which cost millions of ringgits to buy, are often found to have malfunctioned, when there is a death in custody.”

Meanwhile Aliran’s Prema Devaraj did a good piece on the Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission (EAIC) report on Dharmendran’s death, and besides urging everyone to read the report - please read the report - it also summarised pertinent findings...