I first came into contact with the Federal Reserve Unit or FRU in the 1960s. In those days, Kuala Lumpur was notorious for its secret societies and teenage gangs. It was quite common then to see groups of school kids in school uniform having gang fights outside the school gates and at bus stops. There were quite a few teenage murders too.

Things have not changed much. Nowadays you can still feel the presence of these gangs. But today they are into bigger things like peddling narcotics.

To keep these gangs in check, the police deployed the FRU, also known as the "riot squad", in the back lanes and alleys of Kuala Lumpur. These FRU were most feared and it was rumoured that they were employed from amongst the ex-convicts recently released from prison. We never did found out whether this was true, but we had to admit they were worse than the gangsters were. We called them licenced gangsters or "gangster berlesen".

The 1960s was also the era of the music "revolution", the time when the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and many more made their debut. Tight pants and long hair were the rage then. The FRU strolled around town purposely looking for these "teddy boys".

And Heaven forbid if you ever got caught by the FRU. They would shave one side of your head leaving the other side as it is. Needless to say, you would need a haircut later. Then they would push a bottle down your pants and, if it could not pass through, they would slit your pants with a knife.

As a finale, you would get a good whacking and told never to be caught out in the "open" again. That means, stay off the streets.

Imagine the embarrassment when you get caught walking your girlfriend home from the movies. She would be made to watch while you get humiliated and beaten to a pulp. That would be the last she would ever go out with you.

There were even unconfirmed stories that the boys would be given an "option" to run or get beaten up. The lesser mortals would abandon their girlfriends who would get molested or raped by the FRU. I wonder why no one bothered to make any police reports? Is it because you would get a second "round" at the police station if you did?

For the faint hearted, like we 16 year-old schoolboys, we just turned and ran whenever we saw any FRU coming. For sure we would get manhandled if we did not. 

That was how the police kept the teenagers on the straight and narrow then.

Then the government decided to send the FRU to Kelantan. In Kelantan the FRU adopted the same tactics they had used in Kuala Lumpur. But the Kelantanese were not about to take the beatings, slit pants and shaved heads that the city folks had to endure.

(In fact, things have not changed much since the 1960s. The Kelantanese will STILL not take any shit from KL. My hat off to the Kelantanese!)

In the daytime the FRU patrolled the streets of Kota Bharu and beat the hell out of the locals. But the locals would not take it lying down. At night they waited outside the FRU barracks and, whenever any FRU came out to go to town, the locals beat them up bad.

Eventually there was "war" between the locals and the FRU. In the daylight hours the FRU went round town looking for victims. At night they became punching bags for the local boys. It came to a stage the FRU were getting it so bad they could not leave their barracks at night. The FRU eventually had to be withdrawn from Kota Bharu and never set foot in that town again.

Cheers to the boys from Kota Bharu. You sure got guts. We KL boys just took the beatings whenever cornered, and hightailed it out of there whenever escape was possible.

Then in the 1970s another kind of retaliation took place.

The Special Branch was rounding up all the suspected communists, labour unionists, student leaders, and so on. Anwar Ibrahim, Dr Syed Hussein, and many more were victims of this crackdown. Dr Syed Hussien, presently the President of PRM, spent seven years under ISA, which basically is detention without trial – therefore they do not have to prove the person guilty of any crime to detain him or her. Anwar Ibrahim spent close to three years under detention alongside many others.

Many people suffered this fate of detention without trial. And this excludes all those banished or exiled onto the infamous Jerejak Island.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, thousands were just rounded up from all over Malaysia and thrown onto Jerejak Island to die. They had to grow their own food to survive and the weaker ones just got raped or sodomised every night by the stronger ones.

In fact, the police knew that there was an "orgy" going on, on Jerejak Island, as they used to watch through binoculars from across Penang Island. I think the police are one perverted lot as they used to delight in watching these nightly "shows" and treated it as the entertainment of the night.

Is this why they tried to pin the sodomy thing on Anwar Ibrahim? Sodomy must be constantly in the minds of the police that it makes you wonder what they do in those barracks of theirs.

Anyway, some people decided they had had enough of these arrests and abuse. One night, one notorious Special Branch officer was shot dead as he came out of his home in Kampong Atap in Kuala Lumpur. Not long after, another SB officer was shot while he was having his dinner in Jalan Alor, also in Kuala Lumpur.

What shook everyone up was the way in which it was done. The assassin just coolly walked up to the SB chaps, looked them in the eye, pulled out his gun, and with no haste, pulled the trigger. They allowed the SB officers to look death in the face for a few seconds before they sent them to their maker.

Classic if you ask me, and stuff Hollywood gangster movies are made of.

Then they assassinated the Chinese Chief Police Officer of Perak State, another notorious man. Then the Inspector General of Police, the number one policeman in the land, met his untimely death in a traffic jam in Raja Chulan Road in Kuala Lumpur.

All these assassinations were well planned and all remain unsolved until today.

From then on, the police were a bit careful at how they conducted themselves. They did not go round beating up long-haired-tight-pants teenagers anymore. They no longer simply arrested people and threw them onto an island to get raped for the rest of their lives. They no longer "disposed off" criminals to save the country the expense of a trial.

That is, until the last year or two, since the birth of REFORMASI.

Now people, again, get beaten up and arrested for no reason at all just like in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now the police are the enemy rather than the protector of the people just like they were the years before and after May 13. The police have gone one full circle back to the uncivilised days of 30 years ago.

Ah, how I miss the good old days when the people would take no shit from the FRU and the SB officers constantly looked behind lest they get a bullet in the head.

RAJA PETRA KAMARUDIN