3 months ago
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January 16, 2025 | 04:44 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The National Police Headquarters should ensure that the police officers who extorted money from the audience of the DWP 2024 concert are prosecuted. Ethics punishments are not enough.
THE saying that there is no perfect crime is both a belief and the slogan of the police when investigating cases. But the National Police (Polri) headquarters is increasingly perfecting the chain of crimes committed by its own members. Instead of seeking criminal punishment for the officers who extorted money from the spectators of the Djakarta Warehouse Project 2024 concert, Polri officers have only received ethics punishments.
The Polri Ethics Commission has only dishonorably discharged the officers involved in the extortion of DWP 2024 concert attendees on December 13-15. They are Director of Drug Investigation Sr. Comr. Donald Parlaungan Simanjuntak and two of his subordinates, Adj. Sr. Comr. Malvino Edward Yusticia Sitohang and Adj. Comr. Yudhy Triananta Syaeful. Thirteen other officers only received demotions for between five and eight years.
However, they should have all been prosecuted under the Criminal Code. An investigation by this magazine found that the extortion was intentional and planned. Malvino produced a written order for searches for narcotics and dangerous drugs signed by Donald Simanjuntak three days before the concert. This written order made it appear as if the search for drugs was legal.
The target for the extortion was foreign concertgoers. Police officers took them away for urine tests. The frightened audience members then paid money through an attorney provided by the police after being told by officers that Indonesia uses a restorative justice system, realized through the resolution of legal cases by the payment of money.
Each concertgoer deposited Rp100 million. According to police, 45 people were extorted and paid a total of Rp2.5 billion. The Ethics Commission seems to have been reluctant to investigate how much of this money went into the pockets of the police officers carrying out the extortion. They might felt uneasy about investigating crimes committed by their own colleagues.
Therefore, the National Police Headquarters should deploy a special investigator to the Criminal Investigation Department. The actions of these police officers were a crime, not simply a matter of police rudely investigating alleged crime in a way that violated the code of ethics. Extortion and threats are clearly a crime included in the Criminal Code.
The Criminal Code and the Corruption Eradication Law both state that the punishment for extortion by anyone is nine years in jail. And this extortion was carried out by officers working together pretending to search for drugs. There is no fitting punishment apart from putting them behind bars as well as firing them and ensuring their names go down on record as criminals.
This is because these officers intentionally used their law enforcement knowledge and their authority to commit crimes. Urine tests and searches for drugs cannot be conducted arbitrarily. The Narcotics Law states that urine tests can only be used by the police to prove the use of narcotics after an investigation supported by initial evidence. The police are not allowed to simply ask whoever they like to undergo a urine test.
Given the large number of police personnel involved in the extortion of DWP 2024 concertgoers, from low to middle-ranking officers, it is not impossible that more senior officers were involved. Therefore, ethics punishments are not enough. The people responsible must be put on trial in order to expose and solve this perfect crime committed by the police.
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