In Continuum.

Inspector Az

In Hollywood, the job of a police officer is to look good on the cameras while speeding at a hundred miles per hour in a high-speed pursuit. In America, the job of a police officer is to keep their Body-Mass Ratio checked every month before their weight goes over the scale. In Singapore, the job of a police officer – like Azhar – is to scoop up the remains of the deceased, and this is his story.

When asked about the image of a police officer to a five-year old boy, he is going to tell you that being a police officer is what he wants to do when he grows up, after being inspired by Batman or Superman, or the other similar crime-fighting superheroes. After all, to be able to wipe out a whole army of villains with a single nine-millimeter pistol amidst all the explosions does indeed appeal to a child at that age. When asked about the image of a police officer to a teenager, he is going to tell you that they are nothing more than a bunch of people riding around the neighborhood on their bicycles with doughnut crumbs all over their mouths. A middle-aged man like my father calls them the “Pests in Uniforms” because he receives an average of four speeding tickets every year from our guardians of the road, and he claims all of those incidents to be “Justified Speeding”, if that thing exists at all.

The truth is, we have all taken the police officers in Singapore for granted one way or another. I cannot say that I am innocent from that claim, because that was the kind of mentality I had before I met my friend Azhar. Azhar appeared in the doorway of the chalet that we were at a few months ago during the orientation, and the horror stories that he weaved that night chilled us to our bones. Amidst the horror stories, there was a sense of admiration and respect for the man that was sitting on the mattress, with his legs crossed and his hair carefully trimmed. It was hard to imagine that the job of a police officer encompasses the kind of things that he went through for his national service. Since that night, my pre-conception of the profession was utterly shattered – here’s why.

Sitting in front of my friend Azhar – or Inspector Az as he prefers to be known as – there was an air of pride in his work despite his complaints about the job. The reason he believes that there is a misconception in the profession is because of how easy the job may seem under the public’s scrutiny. We see them sitting in the neighborhood police posts, or in the front seat of their patrol cars doing nothing much at all. To Azhar, the boredom involved in the job itself not only wore some of the officers down over time, but also the kind of image the job has to the public.

“Singaporeans are taking police officers for granted because of how long they have been living in peace and harmony”, Azhar said. “ They think that being a police officer during the national service is the easiest way of going through the two years.” It is not uncommon for the daily routines of a police officer to involve settling family disputes, vandalisms from loan-sharks, as well as wild snakes crawling out of toilet bowls. The misconception is rooted in the fact that Singaporeans have been treating the Singapore Police Forces as a family hotline of sorts, calling in just because somebody’s son refused to behave at home. According to Azhar, if he was not out patrolling the streets for gangsters or pickpockets, he’d be sitting in the police post, receiving reports of lost items, dogs, or identification cards.

It is true that Singapore has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. However, Singapore also has one of the highest percentage of suicide rates in the world. Whenever somebody decides to end their lives by throwing themselves off a roof, or hanging themselves in their HDB apartment, it is not going to be up to the people from the hospital morgues to clean up the mess. Believe it or not, it is the police officers who arrive at the scene first to clean up the mess. Here is one of the horror stories that Azhar told me in our interview.

Due to a thing called OSA – or the Official Secrets Act – Azhar declined to let me in on the details of the crime scenes, simply because the victims died from unnatural deaths. In this case, Azhar received an urgent call from a neighborhood in the central area, complaining about strong odor of decaying flesh coming from a unit. Along with his superiors, Azhar arrived at the scene and was thrown off by the smell that attacked their nostrils. The unit was located on the thirteenth storey of the HDB block, but the smell could be sensed halfway up the elevators, and Azhar described to me – though however unwillingly – the smell of dead people.

“ There is something about decaying human flesh that’s just different from other rotting animals.” He said. “ It is nothing compared to a piece of rotting pork or a dead pig. Imagine the worst smell you can imagine in this world, it is probably a hundred times worse.”

I could only imagine how Azhar survived the ordeal that day, banging down the front door to reveal the owner of the house hanging from a belt that was tied to the fan fixated on the ceiling. “The thing about hanging yourself,” Azhar said as he interrupted himself to give me a tutorial on how to hang myself, “is that you want the fall to break your neck when you kick away the chair or the stool. You need a proper knot to do that, and it doesn’t work if you hang yourself with a belt or a phone cable.” Due to the lack of knowledge in that field, the man hanging by his belt clearly did not use the proper knot. Because of that, his tongue stuck out from his mouth like a ruler, and his eyeballs were protruding out of his sockets like ping-pong balls.

The first thing you do when you reach the scene of a suicide is to first check if a person is alive, no matter how dead he looks – “It’s routine.” He explained – then followed by taking the body down from the belt. Due to the fact that the body has been hanging there for days, swarms of maggots came wriggling out of the wound around the man’s throat inflicted by the belt. At this point, Azhar interrupted himself once again to explain to me about the concept of the “Last Breath” as I drew a mental picture of the route I’d take from where we were to the nearest restroom, just in case I needed to vomit my lunch out.

“Because of the belt around the neck, the final breath that the man took could not escape his body through his nose or mouth. Also, the dead body produces methane that becomes trapped in the body when a person dies. So when I tried to carry the dead body down from the ceiling fan, the last breath that was trapped inside his body escaped through his mouth, causing the dead body to groan like a man waking up from his slumber.” The foul smell that lingered with the last breath was probably worse than the smell described earlier, and you wouldn’t want to me standing in front of the dead body when the last breath escapes. “That is why we carry the man down from the back. You don’t want to know what happens when you do it the wrong way round.” He joked. Yes, he joked.

It was hard for me to stomach the facts that have been thrown on me like a tidal wave. It was like a twist in a typical M. Night Shyamalan movie, only much worse and more real. It was harder for me to imagine how Azhar managed to live through his vocation without being traumatized by the images that he saw. “It was the discovery of the vulnerability of humans that appealed to me,” he explained. “It made me treasure my life even more.”

It is hard to appreciate the job of a police officer. After all, they are the same people who prevent us from doing whatever we want in the society. However, there are laws that need to be kept in check, and there are unsung heroes out there who are doing the dirty work nobody knows about. Police officers are more than the keepers of law, but the guardians, the cleaners, and the reason why we sleep safe and sound at night. It may sound cliché to most, but it’s true - it really is.