Indonesian law enforcement officials are constantly going on about the country’s “drug emergency” and using shaky statistics about the number of people killed by narcotics each year as a justification for both the death penalty and top-level directives to shoot drug dealers at the first sign of resistance (which has led to a marked increase in police shootings deaths this year).
But one of the reasons the Indonesian public is so strongly in favor of killing drug dealers is because of the belief that narcotics criminals can simply pay off the police and keep running their businesses, even in prison (which, to be fair, has definitely happened, a lot). Basically, the public thinks the police are too corrupt to resist being corrupted by money from drug dealers.
A newly uncovered case of bribery in East Jakarta certainly won’t do anything to dispel that notion. It involves three narcotics detectives from the local police force having been found to have accepted IDR 40 million (US$2,960) in “protection money” from drug dealers in exchange for not busting up their business.
The three detectives were arrested yesterday by officers from the Jakarta Police Internal Affairs department. According to Jakarta police spokesperson Raden Prabowo Argo Yuwono, the three had promised to not arrest a group of drug dealers in exchange for the bribe.
East Jakarta Police Chief Andry Wibowo was clearly not happy about his officers getting arrested and did not make any attempt at defending them. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Yes indeed, just shoot them (if they really took the money), just shoot them,” Andry said yesterday as quoted by Merdeka (a comment echoing President Joko Widodo’s own directive to the police to “just shoot” foreign drug dealers).
The three detectives are currently being held for furthering questioning by Internal Affairs. The charges against them have not yet been announced.
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