Gone in 6 days

Spot quiz: what is the most populous European city? Singapore is about 4.5m people in 270sq miles. London is ~7.5m people in about 600sq miles so this city state has the higher population density by 30%. The next biggest European city, by the way, is Berlin with 3.5m making London the most populous by a clear factor of two.

What about cars? In 2006, Singapore had 800k vehicles on the roads, of which, about 500k were cars and 140k were motorcycles. That's about 9 cars per 100 people in Singapore, versus about 35 per 100 in London.

Spot quiz: how many cars were reported stolen in Singapore in 2006? You'll never guess. It was 63; one car stolen every 6 days. Motorcycles faired a little worse with 647 but then they are more easily taken and hidden.

They say in Singapore "Low crime Doesn't mean No Crime" but it seems it's all relative. Compared to my experience of vehicle crime, one stolen car every 6 days is not even statistically significant.

Apparently, this doesn't mean low insurance premiums and many bikers only have 3rd party cover, not even TPFT, but then every aspect of vehicle ownership is expensive in Singapore. The adaptive Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) is being steadily expanded in scope. It's simple capitalism, using money to determine who drives and who takes the bus.

Gone but not going away

The saga of escaped detainee Mas Selamat continues. The Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng announced to parliament the disciplinary response to his escape.

From the ST article, 9 staff will be affected:

Who: Two Gurkha guards. They escorted Mas Selamat for his weekly family visit on Feb 27 and let him out of their line of sight.
Penalty: Demoted.

Who: Special duty operative. A junior officer who handled his family visit. She did not take immediate action when alerted by the guards. She also did not observe procedures such as noting how many sets of clothes he had, which is why he had more than one set on him when he escaped.
Penalty: Dismissed.

Who: Special duty operative's supervisor. Failed to assess security regarding detainees' use of the Family Visitation Block toilet.
Penalty: Letter of reprimand. Relieved of all supervisory duties.

Who: Technical officer responsible for CCTV upgrading at the Whitley Road centre. Did not ensure that the system was recording at the time of the incident
Penalty: Letter of warning.

Who: Chief warder. She approached the superintendent to allow detainees to use the toilet at the Family Visitation Block
Penalty: Letter of warning.

Who: Whitley centre's deputy superintendent. Lack of supervision over subordinates implicated in the case.
Penalty: Demoted with pay cut.

Who: Whitley centre's superintendent. Lack of supervision over subordinates implicated. Also failed to take appropriate action upon discovering the unsecured toilet ventilation window.
Penalty: Dismissed.

Who: ISD Command Director and officer-in-charge of Whitley centre.
Penalty: Relieved of his responsibilities to oversee the centre.

All in all, a fair and weighted response although some have already claimed the ultimate boss, the minister, should resign (Japanese style) to take responsibility for the whole fiasco, I think this approach is better because it distinguishes between Management and Policy.

A Minister sets Policy and directs operational matters as a delegated function. If a minister fails to respond to an issue raised to her, then sure, she becomes part of the operational chain of command. In this case, guards didn't guard, a window was left unsecured (they sawed off the handle to prevent it being opened when they should have fitted bars), CCTV wasn't properly working, and so on. These are Operational matters, not policy.

When it comes to politics, cynicism knows no bounds and one of the reasons I am keeping an eye on this story is that it clearly is an embarrassment to the Government that puts great store in competence. The view floating around the blogoshpere was that the story would be allowed to run for a while, the Government would take its beating, then a line would be firmly drawn under the affair and that would be that.

So I was waiting for this line to appear, and so far, it has not. The out-going border checkpoints are still clogged with vehicles being laboriously inspected (the local residents have complained about the frustrated car and truck horns at all times of the day and night). The fugitive's picture is still all over the place, in stations, bus shelters, shopping malls. Even the Straits Times website (free pages) have the image permanently showing and if a Government-directed line was being drawn, you can bet it would be seen there first. It looks like this story has a way to run. Unless they catch him of course which would spoil it for socio-political commentators.

Gone with the Wind

I've mentioned the sudden loss from custody of Mas Selamat a couple of times so for the sake of closure for regular readers, you may be interested in the Government report on the escape.

In a nutshell, he prepared by wearing outside clothes underneath ths detention attire, popped into a closed toilet, changed, jumped out of the (un-barred) window and then bypassed 2 security fences by running along the roof of a covered walkway. The guards didn't and the CCTV was turned off. No-one is going to be disciplined for these lapses and it's up in the air where this falls on the complacent <-> incompetent continuum but the PM has said there shouldn't be a witchhunt.

As is often the case, the side stories catch my interest and the latest twist is that the resulting manhunt has also nabbed 66 illegal immigrants, some of whom were caught

"by a network of 'trip wires' set up by the authorities to snag the fugitive terrorist in case he takes cover in places like forests where the search forces have already combed.

Police operations director Wong Hong Kuan said the 'trip wires' included surveillance equipment and 'human eyes and ears' to ferret out the 47-year-old fugitive."

I thought that was a neat revelation of the search techniques used. They still haven't found him and the public line is that he hasn't left Singapore, though it's a mystery to me quite how they know where he isn't when they have no clue where he is. Mind you, in such games, perhaps it is in Singapore's interest to maintain a state of heightened alertness and in Selamat's interest to keep everybody guessing.

Complacent, Moi?

You may remember I mentioned the strange and sudden loss from secure custody of Mas Selamat. He was being detained, without charge or trial, under security laws for links to terrorism. I also reported MM Lee's commentary that his escape showed a worrying complacency, a milder word that most would use to describe such a lapse.

Last week's Times ran a full page piece building on the story titled "Kiasu, Kiasi ... now complacent" where they widened the debate:

His rebuke was directed at the security agencies ... but it applied equally to Singaporeans at large, who may have been lulled by decades of peace into believing that Singapore is a place where things do not go wrong.

This then is the Singapore paradox: a pervasive fear of losing (kiasu) .. side by side with a sense of satisfaction and security that sometimes borders on smugness

The Times is the primary daily paper; the paper of record. It is independent but is still part of the system. It never takes a campaigning stance against the Government and while it does report all news, good and bad, it is always careful to balance the debate. (I joke that it manages to find 3 sides to every argument). It is unfailingly upbeat, highlighting positive responses to issues. So for the latest rice micro-crisis which sees rising monthly food bills, it splashes across 3 pages, typical families (Chinese, Malay, Indian) and how they immediately examined their weekly food basket to eliminate luxuries (Ben & Jerry's ice cream) and re-balance their budget.

So, complete, balanced, upbeat and sometimes incredibly dull. It almost makes you wish for a Daily Mail just to spice things up a bit and indeed the freebie tabloid My Paper is more direct and entertaining.

Anyway, back to complacency. So the Times then goes on to give possible reasons for this presumed public complacency:

1. Side effect of long-term successful Government
2. Lack of crisis
3. Lack of awareness of how Government works

And it's true that a competent, successful semi-autocracy has steered Singapore through an amazing 50 years. The major crime prevention campaign slogan is "Low crime doesn't mean no crime", that is, to highlight the continued existence of crime. Contrast that with (former British Home Secretary) Michael Howard who was advised by his Principle Secretary upon taking office that his job was to "manage down public expectations that crime can be prevented".

What amused me were the letters to the Times' editor printed a week later whose consistent message was that if the public is complacent it's because the Government has spent 50 years telling everyone about the wonderful and hardworking civil servants doing a fantastic job and how amazing Singapore is. Touche!

You can't have it both ways; either the Government is competent and the public stands back or it's not and the public demands scrutiny. The debate is relevant to Singapore's political and business leaders but the Times went too far to expand the charge of complacency to the entire population.

Manhunt or Womanhunt

Crime stories from Japan that make world news are exceptional and usually involve dead foreigners. One such tragedy is Lindsay Hawker, an English teacher found dead & buried in sand in a bathtub on a guy's balcony. The prime suspect has been on the run for a year now and in an attempt to liven up the search, the police have issued Photoshopped photos including him dressed as a woman.

I haven't mentioned Singapore's on-going manhunt as it's a straight-forward problem: the security forces are looking for an escaped, suspected terrorist, Mas Selamat. In a nutshell, he was in a (very!) secure facility, was being taken to a room for a family visit and asked to go to the toilet. He hasn't been seen since. They have good, contemporary photographs, he's short and he limps.

The level of official embarrassment is hard to quantify. Acute certainly doesn't cover it. MM Lee described the security forces as "complacent"; a very well chosen word. The official coverage has focused on finding him but at some point, especially if they don't re-capture him, there will have it be a reckoning.

In the case of Tatsuya Ichihashi, our bath tub suspect, a reasonable guess would be he's dead. Suicide. He fled with no shoes, little money and as a strange loner, would find it very hard to hide without help. The search for Mas Selamat has been to comb scrub land and step up security around ports, checkpoints and coastal areas. His picture is posted everywhere: MRTs, bus shelters, stations, buildings. A photo MMS was sent to most mobile phones in the country (I received it but don't have MMS capability) and by e-mail to all SingNet subscribers.

Smart money is that he has friends, and has already fled to Malaysia or Indonesia, or is in a safe house somewhere. Given that "escape dressed as woman" gets over 900,000 hits on Google, maybe the Singaporean police should take a tip from the Japanese and get Photoshopping?

Say what you really think

Tuesday's Straits Times reported on an Islamic (Sharia) court in Terenganu, Malaysia which passed a 2 year jail sentence on a 57 year old woman for being a follower of a cult centered on a giant tea pot. Her (religious) crime was to declare herself apostate while still a Muslim. Apostasy can be a capital crime for Muslims and she did refuse to repent but you have to wonder if the real offence was taken over being spiritually dumped for a piece of crockery. That's got to hurt. The money quote is from presiding judge Mohamad Abdullah:

"What she did was not within the concept of freedom of religion".

What tickled me about this story is not so much the venerated tea pot, or even a jail sentence for an unusual belief but the problem of communicating with the world from a particular perspective and not sounding daft. It reminds me of when the French were still doing nuclear weapon testing in the Pacific and their Ambassador to New Zealand, speaking at the National Press Club there, tried to correct what he perceived as inaccurate reporting:

"I don't like this word bomb. It is not a bomb, it is a device, which explodes."

Technically correct as all tests were underground by that time, but still a classically funny quote. In both cases, the speaker is factually spot on, but I suspect many non-Muslims will mis-understand the term "freedom of religion" as used here.

The extent to which this is a failure of reporting is hard to judge. The same paper carried an article about one of the paper's own board of Directors essentially arguing that self-restraint, indeed "ex extremis, censorship" is necessary. He came across as a committed journalist but I'll leave you with the final paragraph:

Our role is to read the verdict of the people correctly so that the Government can continue to retain the mandate of heaven to rule.