As Malaysians reflect over our internal injustice in light of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the United States, Suaram’s statistics on custodial deaths came to the fore of public discussion with some using Suaram’s data set to substantiate their views while others raised concerns on inherent inaccuracies and potential misinterpretation.

As the person sifting through limited data and producing them in the data set in Suaram’s report annually for the past five years, I think it is a good time for me to make a minor intervention...