EDITORIAL - Deputy Minister’s thugs using ‘minimum force’

It appears that the thugs of a politician have used ‘minimum force’ on a police constable! The lead story of yesterday’s paper was about an assault on a police officer who gave a speeding ticket to a deputy minister who was little known before the incident. The deputy minister has allegedly threatened the police constable who gave the driver of his vehicle a speeding ticket at the exit point of the Southern Expressway in Kottawa.
 The deputy minister has allegedly shouted at the police officer; we quote, “Hey, you idiot! You’d better learn who I am. You have butted your head against a rock. See what will happen to you.” However this verbal assault didn’t make the police officer to retreat and he carried out his duty properly. The fuming deputy minister had allegedly left the scene with a very strong statement, according to the police officer; again we quote, “the road was meant for people like us.”
 A few days later, the police officer was attacked by an unidentified armed gang while he was on his way to report for duty and his car was set on fire. On our inquiry, the deputy minister completely distanced himself from the incident and stressed that perpetrators of incidents such as this should be penalised irrespective of their status. However, he accepted the fact that his driver was given a speeding ticket despite his telling the relevant police officer that the vehicle belonged to a minister and, he called a higher-up in the Police Department to complain about the incident.
The entire incident very well depicts what has happened to the law and order and how feeble the law enforcement agencies have become. May be more than that, it is interesting to see how the police who since of late have shown more interest in being lackeys to politicians and the political regime than in protecting the law and order in the country are getting it from those they wanted to protect. The irony is, the police who used the so called ‘minimum force’ on university students in a recent incident, not following the proper legal procedure, and brutally assaulting a few of them to get the credit from the political regime, are now being subject to the ‘minimum force’ of the riff raffs employed by the same political regime. The result is, the poor police constable in this incident, who tried to do his job unbowing to the political pressure does not get the much deserved public empathy and support for the plight he is currently in.
 Therefore, we believe it is high time to make the Police Department a respectable independent organ to protect the constitutional rights of the people of this country. If not, a disillusioned law enforcement force could do many a thing that neither the regime nor the people want to see.