Police and Military play important role in ensuring national security, social order for both nation and people. For me, I feel afraid of them. In reality, I should not do when I meet them on the public place. On the contrary, when I drive across the traffic police checkpoints seeing them standing security guard, my feeling is still afraid of them. Why I said that is because when they fined motorists and car drivers who broke traffic law. That is right but some of them shows the power and threat to innocent people rather than protect people.
For a few years ago, I and friends of mine were riding motorcycles along Monivong Boulevard and met a group military police standing and checking weapons off the ministry of information. And then they stopped us and checked our body to find out illegal handgun usage. They did not find out because we had no gun. By the way, all of my friends had not known how to use gun. Next, what happened at the scene was that military police talked to my friend that “your motorcycle had not been stuck the yearly vehicle tax sticker.” My friend pulled it out from his pocket to show them. Even though, he blamed him why not to stick it to your motorcycle. My friend told them that “I just paid it and I will stick it to my motorcycle later”. Amongst one of military police, he countered that “you have to pay fine”. At that time, verbal dispute occurred between my group and military. And later, police threatened to fight us. I felt afraid of them. Then we tried to compromise dispute. The dispute was over peacefully.
In fact, the military police had no rights to fine people; it is the duty of traffic police. By the way, we had no mistake at all. That was the excuse for them to extort money from people.
On the other hand, I always see police pocket money from taxi drivers, when taxis drivers drive across traffic police checkpoints. In fact, the drivers did not break the law or made a mistake. According to road traffic law passed by National Assembly, it stated that traffic police found guilty of extorting money from drivers would face fines of between $500 and $1,000 and could spend between one and three years behind bars. At that point, when police took only 1000 to 10,000 riel from drivers, will drivers file a complaint against them? It is no way for drivers to spend their time on suing them. How to eliminate petty corruption on the street?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Hopefully the Cambodian system will overtime trim corruption.
It is not right and illegal for these police personal to abuse their authority. In a place where everyone do what they can to survive, even police officers are extorting people for money.