Just a few days ago, we expressed our eagerness to see the National Police follow a court order to investigate the parties behind the four Indonesian Military (TNI) personnel held responsible for the acid attack on human rights activist Andi Yunus and expose the true motives behind the criminal act.
However, that may now be a false hope after the House of Representatives unanimously passed on Tuesday (June 9) the amendment to the 2002 Police Law, morphing the institution into a more powerful body without adequate checks and balances.
The rushed deliberation of the revision at the House, going through only two hearings on June 4 and 8, not only violates the prudent legislative principle of meaningful public consultation, but also demonstrates a political process laden with narrow, elitist interests.
We have grown all too familiar with this pattern when we recall the rewriting of the Corruption Eradication Commission Law, the Job Creation Law, the new Criminal Code, the Criminal Law Procedure Code and the TNI Law over the past few years.
Beyond the flawed process, the amended Police Law pushes the force further away from the very spirit of reform the nation embraced in 2000, which separated the police from the military to serve as a professional law enforcement agency with a strong mandate to maintain security and order.
More recently, President Prabowo Subianto formed a committee to accelerate the police reform agenda, but it ultimately resulted in watered-down recommendations intended to maintain the status quo.
The amended Police Law is rife with provisions that could endanger our democracy. For example, Article 28A allows active police officers to hold government positions.
While framed as relating to police duties, this kind of assignment breaches the Constitutional Court ruling that bans this practice and directly undermines the professional, non-partisan ethos of the police.
The revision also fails to live up to longstanding public demands for effective external oversight. Based on the new law, the National Police Commission will remain a toothless consultative body without any authority to punish errant officers.
We cannot expect the police to uphold professionalism without independent supervision. As in the case of the new TNI Law, the amended Police Law raises officers’ retirement age up to 60 years old.
Four-star generals, most likely the police chiefs, are now allowed to serve until 61 at the president’s discretion. Not only does this provision lack solid reasoning, but it will also create an unnecessary career regeneration bottleneck.
More worryingly, state-sponsored violence looks set to be normalised as the police now carry out duties related to "national strategic interests.” This clause can justify the deployment of police to protect National Strategic Projects against any form of opposition, including from indigenous communities.
Looked at closely, these revisions reveal a far more cynical underlying motive: a calculated manoeuvre designed to maintain a "balance of power" within a national political landscape increasingly defined by creeping remilitarisation.
By mirroring the expanding institutional privileges of the TNI, the civilian government is engaging in a dangerous political experiment. It is one that directly betrays democratic reform goals, jeopardises civil liberties and risks normalising the political mobilisation of the armed state apparatus.
In the face of a resurgent TNI over the past decade, the state has chosen not to curb military expansionism, but rather to artificially inflate the stature of the police to match it. We are witnessing the creation of a fragile competitive equilibrium, using a heavily empowered civilian police force as a counterweight to a remilitarised military.
Weaponising the structural framework of the police to offset military influence does not protect the civilian sphere; it merely accelerates the securitisation of Indonesian politics. By sacrificing the hard-won principles of the Reform era for short-term political equilibrium, the state has set a hazardous precedent where peace is maintained not through democratic consensus, but through the volatile, competitive expansion of armed institutions.
There is no choice left for civil society but to file a judicial review of the revised Police Law. This is the exact same path now underway at the Constitutional Court against the TNI Law. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
