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SINGAPORE – When a woman was arrested earlier this month at the Novena Square shopping center, video of her arrest was circulated, with some claiming that the police had abused their power and arrested her for no reason.
This use of misinformation was an attempt to delegitimize the police, Interior and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said on Friday (October 30).
Speaking at the minister’s award presentation ceremony, which was held online, Mr. Shanmugam noted that there have been a growing number of attempts to delegitimize enforcement agencies.
But police and other agencies will not be intimidated by such attempts, he added.
“When the police take action, there are those who claim that the investigations are politically motivated, they make other unsubstantiated claims about law enforcement processes,” he said.
He also said some people want special exemptions from investigations, especially when the allegations against them are of a serious nature, such as those involving criminal breach of trust or sexual harassment.
“But the rule of law applies to everyone, regardless of who it is,” Shanmugam said.
The minister said the woman detained in Novena Square is receiving treatment at the Institute of Mental Health.
In the incident, he spat at a man and bit his hand, after allegedly pouring a bowl of soup over his head.
The woman also hurled insults and spat at police officers when they confronted her, and her relatives were unable to calm her down.
“She was assessed as posing a danger, both to the public and to herself,” Shanmugam said.
On the other hand, he said that in July last year a photo was misrepresented that showed police officers implicating two students from the madrassa.
“The photo was circulated to spread a falsehood, that the agents were carrying out controls on the two students of the madrassa, because the agents had a quota to fulfill,” he said.
But officers were actually engaging students to encourage them to participate in Riders-On-Watch, a community policing initiative enacted last year to keep crime off transportation nodes.
In his speech, Shanmugam also highlighted two other key challenges currently facing the local team: the threat of terrorism, which has not gone away, and the fight against Covid-19.
He said the Home Team, along with other agencies, has helped reduce local community transmission to a low level.
But the risk of another wave of infection is always present, he added.
“The fight can be long. We have to adapt to this new environment, to ensure that the local team fulfills our primary mission of keeping Singapore safe and secure,” he added.
On Friday, 189 awards were presented to outstanding officers, teams and agencies who demonstrated efficiency and competence in major operations, cases and projects, or demonstrated high standards of innovation and service excellence in the course of their work.
Recipients included a team of police officers involved in Operation Unmask, which saw 21 people arrested for their involvement in more than 440 cases of e-commerce scams.
These scams, related to the sale of masks, deceived victims of more than $ 10 million in total.
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