Police, journalists do job in their own way

two months after the infamous 1987 Op Lalang, a tip-off from a police detective had me rushing into an estate deep in Sungai Ular, some 10km from Kulim, Kedah, in the middle of the night to cover a piece of news over the gruesome murders of two young siblings.

It was horrifying to witness the decapitated bodies of two sisters, aged 10 and 12, still clad in their school uniforms, wedged between the tree branches in the estate. The perpetrator had also raped the siblings. That last piece of information on the detail of the case was known after a postmortem was carried out on their remains.

I filed the news story that had a cult overtone and it was carried on the front page of the newspaper the next day, although it was just two paragraphs long. What happened next is mindboggling.

I received a call from the news editor telling me that I needed to do some explaining to the police as they had denied the murders were related to a cult. A man in his 50’s was singled out in the case as the perpetrator. But his followers were not arrested.

You see, it was sensitive to write such stories during a time when racial or religious issues would invite reprisals from certain quarters of the community, even if it was a criminal case that’s newsworthy. During the Op Lalang aftermath, journalists were “advised” to write “feelgood” stories that would put society at ease.

Op Lalang was a crackdown conducted beginning Oct 27, 1987 by police to prevent racial riots.

The operation saw non-governmental organisation activists, opposition politicians, intellectuals, students, artists, scientists and others detained without trial under the Internal Security Act 1960 (ISA).

It also involved the revoking of the publishing licences of certain newspapers. Following the murders, my relations with the police deteriorated as I was given the cold shoulder in Kulim, Bukit Mertajam, Butterworth and Nibong Tebal.

Being a general desk reporter in the northern region was hard, considering that these areas were hot spots for criminal activities back then. At the time, crime news boosted newspaper sales, especially vernacular ones that printed graphic photos of accident and crime scenes.

The “love-hate” relations did not just affect me. It also impacted other journalists in these areas. The police would call for a press conference if there was a big haul of drugs but refused to cooperate to offer comments if reporters were to follow-up on other leads for the same case.

Subsequently, I decided to ask a police officer about the sudden aloofness by certain district police chiefs. He replied: “You guys are always jumping the gun, messing up police investigations in criminal cases. The police won’t look good when the case goes to the courts.”

Furthermore, the police officer said every contingent in the country received “a strong message from the top”, ordering them to stop giving tip-offs on police investigations or operations.

But, the thing is, whatever communication devices the police had, journalists too had their way of knowing of what, where and when police were conducting their operations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many journalists owned a high-frequency radio that could tap police communications’ frequency. That’s why you could see journalists and photographers milling around at a crime scene as soon as it happened.

I did not own such devices because they were expensive then, but I know many journalists from the vernacular press had one. I know it was unethical and illegal to own a high-frequency radio and listen to police communications. But there were many journalists then who owned up to getting “scoops”, defined as exclusive news stories, ahead of other newspapers.

It was the heat of the moment where “scooping business” among journalists was like winning a gruelling marathon. As the police had just celebrated the 214th Police Day, there’s a paradox between police work and journalists’ job that is not easy to resolve — each doing their job in their own way.

But, kudos to the police force for stamping out crime over the years so that citizens like you and me remain safe.