they just harass political opponents a bit and that’s it
All in a day's work.
half the force is conscripts who just want it to be over, other half is people who just want a job
You underestimate their competency and effectiveness. There's an entire segment of the force that are career police officers that deal with the dark underbelly of Singapore that very few Singaporeans know or talk about anymore. It was common knowledge 50 or so years ago but it's been completely whitewashed, as with everything else in Singapore (another tactic out of the Israeli books, I'd say).
Crime in Singapore is low because the who's who in the Singapore Police Force work with gangs and triads to keep disruption of public order at the minimum. It's a case of I'll scratch your back and you don't bother with my illegal business activities. Every once in a while the gangs would throw the police a small fish to catch as a sacrifice to look away for the other 99 that get through.
Not to mention their complicity in all things Israel. There were recently protesters against the Singapore-Israel arms trade, they hung a banner at Gardens by the Bay and are currently "under investigation" by the police. This usually means the police have told them to cease and desist or else.
Add all that to the fact that you don't have a right to a lawyer in Singapore, the police (and by extension, the government) actually have tremendous powers over the societal order, and hence "low crime".
The public is very involved in it, we love snitching, we love seeing others fail, we love catching criminals on the street so that we can whack them a bit before the police come. We have public order because we do like having order.
Gangs are not doing well because crime doesn't pay, to the point they have to actually get late night jobs to get paid, and rivals love sabotaging each other because they love seeing each other fail. All the lupsup places keep getting raided. So why do crime when you can be a property or insurance agent?
I suppose I'm complicit in Israel? I've fired a SPIKE missile, that's a few hundred thousand dollars sent their way. That's not supporting anything, that's just wanting to be friends with everyone, and in Israel's case, seeing some parallels of being surrounded by Muslim-majority countries. And we're buying more from Sweden now so Israel is becoming less important.
That's not supporting anything, that's just wanting to be friends with everyone, and in Israel's case, seeing some parallels of being surrounded by Muslim-majority countries.
The parallels run a lot deeper than that. For one, Israel pretty much gave Singapore the handbook of how to build and run a standing military despite their relatively small populations (IDF officers literally trained the first batches of SAF troops). Add to that the deep business and political ties between the countries and the similitude of their geopolitical standing in their respective geographic neighborhoods (and hence institutionalizing the disenfranchisement of the local Malay-Muslim population during the early independence years), I've always believed that Singapore is basically Israel-lite (albeit with a much lower tolerance for violence and bloodshed, instead opting to go all-in on the rules-based order espoused by the West).
We really do just want to be friends with everyone. After independence, one of the first countries we reached out to other than Israel was Japan, the very country that genocided us a bit. The main reason we're an economic powerhouse today is because Japan was so happy that someone wanted to talk to them, that they created our industry for us from the ground up, among other help.
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u/welcomefinside Apr 17 '24
All in a day's work.
You underestimate their competency and effectiveness. There's an entire segment of the force that are career police officers that deal with the dark underbelly of Singapore that very few Singaporeans know or talk about anymore. It was common knowledge 50 or so years ago but it's been completely whitewashed, as with everything else in Singapore (another tactic out of the Israeli books, I'd say).
Crime in Singapore is low because the who's who in the Singapore Police Force work with gangs and triads to keep disruption of public order at the minimum. It's a case of I'll scratch your back and you don't bother with my illegal business activities. Every once in a while the gangs would throw the police a small fish to catch as a sacrifice to look away for the other 99 that get through.
Not to mention their complicity in all things Israel. There were recently protesters against the Singapore-Israel arms trade, they hung a banner at Gardens by the Bay and are currently "under investigation" by the police. This usually means the police have told them to cease and desist or else.
Add all that to the fact that you don't have a right to a lawyer in Singapore, the police (and by extension, the government) actually have tremendous powers over the societal order, and hence "low crime".