from: Valter Vadivel, via email
Dato R. Sri Sanjeewan is an ambitious young man who hails from the small town of Bahau, Negeri Sembilan. According to his small circle of friends he was just a mild mannered student of SMK Bahau, holding posts such as librarian and secretary of Fire Brigade Society back then. Another interesting fact about him is that he was just a mediocre student and opted for arts stream after failed to fare well in his PMR.
However, the 32-year-old son of a Prudential Insurance manager shot to fame with his NGO, Malaysian Crime Watch Task Force or MyWatch. Though started as a crime-watch organisation, the task force was found to be much busier as a police watchdog rather than as a crime buster.
This is probably because the police and crime are intertwined though negatively related; which means the reduction in the crime rate would reflect positively on police and vice versa.
While the NGO was busy revealing the misdeeds of cops, in 2013, Sanjeevan was shot execution-style at a traffic light junction in his hometown. Drug dealers and police were blamed for this assassination attempt. Some even went to the extent of saying that the whole shooting incident was staged by Sanjeevan himself.
Less than two months after the shooting incident, MyWatch’s famous patron, Tan Sri Musa Hassan, left MyWatch citing the misuse of the NGO by “certain people”. His sudden exit followed by the shooting incident had cost MyWatch’s credibility dearly.
The chairman of the crime watch NGO took another blow in June 2016, when he was allegedly caught in a close proximity raid involving a woman Police Inspector in a luxury hotel in Seremban.
Since then the crime-watchdog NGO founder has been tainted with multiple criminal allegations and is busy frequenting lock ups and courts.
His NGO’s role as a crime watchdog has become highly questionable even though the criminal allegations are about the chairman alone.
The MyWatch chairman should take the necessary steps to be cleansed of the criminal allegations against him in order to regain the public’s confidence. On the other hand, the IGP also has a moral responsibility to do the same about allegations levelled at him.
In a nutshell, both sides should stop waging war on each other and work together to fight crime more effectively for the benefit of the people at large.
Valter Vadivel is an FMT reader.
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