NST Leader: When crooked officers get recruited

LEADERS of our enforcement agencies have a commendable dream: they want to rid them of crooked officers. But the reality is, the dream often turns into a nightmare.

Consider what happened on Oct 14 to the Johor Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) to see why dreams become nightmares. On that day, two Indonesians were arrested for attempting to smuggle drugs off Forest City’s guarded coastline. It was reported that the two smugglers might have had the help of Johor’s maritime security network.

Maritime sources told the New Straits Times that the smugglers likely had knowledge of marine patrol gaps and blind spots in the highly-monitored Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone and Special Financial Zone. The sources also did not rule out “ground-level cohorts” who might have fed traffickers details on patrol gaps and off-duty windows. This takes Malaysia’s national security to a dangerous place.

But this is not the first time we are made to head there. Speaking to the NST, Johor MMEA acting director Captain (Maritime) Kama Azri Kamil said the agency was intensifying enforcement of joint operations and intelligence sharing with other bodies. Among the enforcement agencies he named were the police, National Anti-Drug Agency and Customs Department.

Some may think that this is just an MMEA problem. Not so quick. It happens in almost every enforcement agency. Crooked officers after the “Jho Low” lifestyle are in the Immigration Department, Customs Department, Malaysian Border Control and Protection Agency (MCBA), police, Department of Environment, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and more.

Take MCBA, a single agency established in February to oversee all international borders in phases. By 2026, it would have oversight over 114 of them, including the 22 checkpoints it began managing in February. We may have thought that the more than 20 agencies that handled border checkpoints before were the cause of “cohorts” mushrooming within the organisations.

Not entirely true. Even when MCBA became a single entity, the security breach surfaced. Just six months after MCBA became a single agency, the MACC detained 27 people, including 18 MCBA officers, at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport Terminals 1 and 2 over alleged involvement in a “counter-setting” syndicate that facilitated foreign nationals’ entry without following proper procedures.

As of Oct 1, the MACC stated that the investigation was nearing completion and 14 MCBA officers are expected to be charged.

Restructuring enforcement agencies is important but that alone won’t solve the problem because crooked officers have somehow managed to enter the new organisation. It is being led by a no-nonsense head, but one man can only do so much.

The answer lies in two more action steps: one is to make the guilty accountable and two is to keep the corrupt from being recruited. Neither of the two we are good at.

As for accountability, we often read about this or that officer being arrested and then there is a long silence. Admittedly, keeping the corrupt at the gates of the enforcement agency isn’t an easy thing to do. But there are tests that can detect latent crookedness.

© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd

Source link