Having been to Malaysia many times before, I've heard numerous stories from friends and family about the corruption and policing techniques. On Friday and Saturday evenings, road blocks are often set up to catch drink drivers, but instead of arresting them and banning, the police are just waiting to be paid off. The police are paid peanuts by the government and the way they earn more money is to extort the public in the way of bribery. Apparently it depends on the individual cop, but I've heard of people hiding all their money as soon as they see the police and saying all they have is 3RM (just over 50p) on them and getting away with that.
The situation we found ourselves in on Wednesday night was a first hand experience of how the corruption system works and seeing the "ugly side of Malaysia".
We'd finished drinking in Changkat around midnight and our friend kindly offered to give Lewis and I a lift to meet my cousin. Arriving near the destination, our slightly drunk friend jumped a red light thinking no police in sight only then to find blue lights and sirens coming towards us.
I was told under normal circumstances, the police would have let her go for nothing, but as she had foreigners in the car, with no passports, they used the opportunity to get some money out of us. There were two police officers, one who came to check the driving license and one holding an MP5 and checked our ID, something I didn't really want to mess with! Initially asking for 2000RM, with the police's excuse being, your friends are rich, they can pay. my friend bargained her way down to 100RM before they let us go!!... Cheeky bastards!!
As Malaysians say......Malaysia BOLEH!!
Assholes!!!!
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