JAKARTA/KUALA LUMPUR (Jakarta Post/ANN): Eighteen police officers are to face ethics hearings next week over allegations they had extorted 45 Malaysians attending the Djakarta Warehouse Project (DWP) dance music festival in Jakarta earlier this month.
National Police internal affairs chief Insp. Gen. Abdul Karim told a press briefing on Tuesday that the 18 officers had been detained. “The investigation by the internal affairs division decided to bring the alleged culprits to an ethics hearing next week,” Abdul said.
He did not disclose the officers’ identities, only saying that they were from different precincts and sub-precincts in Central Jakarta as well as the Jakarta Metropolitan Police.
The police also confiscated Rp 2.5 billion (US$154,197) in cash. The announcement on the ethics probe comes after viral complaints over the alleged extortion, with some users posting on X that certain police officers had extorted money from festivalgoers by forcing them to take drug tests and threatening criminal charges when their test results came back negative.
The three-day festival ran from Dec. 13 to 15 at Jakarta International Expo (JIExpo) in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta. After the extortion allegations went viral, the police’s internal affairs received reports from two Malaysian nationals, Abdul said, without providing further details.
“We, the police, are committed to investigating any alleged violations by our own officers. We will take stern action” if they were proved guilty, he said.
Abdul added that his office was in constant communication with the National Police Commission (Kompolnas) as the “external oversight” body, “so we are transparent in our investigation”.
He did not mention if criminal charges would be brought against the 18 officers if the internal probe found the allegations to be true. Festival organizer Ismaya Live posted a message on Instagram last week, urging people to report any information they had about the DWP incident to the police.
It also said it was working “to prevent such incidents from happening again in the future”.
The incident is the latest to emerge amid eroding public trust in police accountability and the institution’s ability to root out problems within their ranks following numerous reports of police brutality and impunity, following the alleged fatal police shooting of a teenager in late November in Semarang, Central Java.
On Monday, Tourism Minister Widiyanti Putri Wardhana expressed regret over the DWP incident, which she described as a setback in the government’s efforts to promote Indonesia as a world-class tourist destination.
"The ministry [issues] an apology over the incident,” Widiyanti said in a press release, and that the Tourism Ministry supported the ethics probe into the 18 officers.
“We also fully support the police campaign to prevent drug abuse and enforce the law,” she said, emphasizing that the ministry was “ready to collaborate and improve ourselves in the future”.
Launched in 2008, DWP is said to be one of the largest electronic dance music festivals in Asia and attracts thousands of fans of the genre. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
