Article

Police

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Police

The police in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo emerged as a colonial institution shaped by the practical demands of frontier governance, tin-mining security, and the management of multi-ethnic populations in the Straits Settlements and the Malay States. From its earliest formalisation in Malacca in 1827 through the creation of the Federated Malay States Police in the 1890s, the police served simultaneously as a civil administrative instrument, a military garrison, and a community-integrated force whose composition and deployment reflected the particular social geography of each territory. The records preserved in the Society’s journals document a force that was never merely a law-enforcement body but a central mechanism through which colonial authority was projected into the interior, revenue was collected, and the boundaries of sovereignty were policed against piracy, banditry, and inter-communal violence.

Origins and Institutional Formation

The first documented attempt to create a regular police force in the region occurred in Malacca following the establishment of British civil government in 1825. On 5 July 1827, Governor Robert Fullerton personally nominated W. T. Lewis as Superintendent of Police and of Lands, a post that carried a salary of 1,500 Sicca Rupees per month in addition to ten per cent of all land revenue collections [1, pp. 252]. The new force was built upon two pre-existing structures: the Dutch-era Burgher Watch, whose four headmen were retained in office, and the penghulu system, in which local headmen had long exercised informal authority over the peace of their respective districts under the terms of ancient land grants [1, pp. 251]. Fullerton’s minutes of the Council meeting explicitly subordinated the penghulus to the Chief Police Officer, describing them as “the best Agents already established and known to the people” for the prevention of robbery and the apprehension of offenders [1, p. 252]. The initial establishment numbered 63 men at a total monthly cost of 1,025 Sicca Rupees, comprising 28 peons, 21 penghulus, four headmen of the Burgher Watch, two constables, and various clerical and specialist attachments [1, p. 259].

The formative years of the Malacca police were marked less by institutional design than by personal conflict. Lewis, an uncovenanted civil servant formerly of the Bencoolen Establishment, found his relations with Resident Samuel Garling rapidly embittered. Garling, supported by Assistant Resident Church, repeatedly sought to have Lewis superseded, arguing that the policing of the town suffered from his absence and that a covenanted servant was more appropriately placed in the post [1, pp. 257–259]. The Governor, who had personally appointed Lewis and who was then advocating vigorously for Malacca to become the Presidency Station of the Straits, declined to entertain the suggestion [1, p. 258]. Lewis himself recommended in 1829 that the penghulus be removed from the police establishment entirely, writing that “they are of no use for Police service,” a position that likely reflected his desire to supplant them with men of his own choosing [1, p. 259].

The outstanding security threat in this period was piracy. Lewis proposed the establishment of fixed coastal outposts, which in practice constituted the first police stations, though of a semi-military character. The guard at Pulau Besar, established in 1829 with a Havildar’s detachment, proved immediately effective: Lewis reported that “the protection which the guard at Pulau Besar has given to the Southern Part of the Malacca Districts has already induced several families to remove from the lands adjoining Malacca boundaries. The people consider it as the greatest blessing that could be afforded them” [1, p. 257]. The Settlement’s acute fiscal deficit—expenditure of 126,678 Sicca Rupees against revenue of only 44,080 in 1827—constrained all expansion, and Lewis’s proposal for an establishment of 150 peons was not taken up [1, pp. 255].

By 1854 the force had grown substantially, reflecting the development of the tin-mining interior. The town police numbered 117 men in three classes of peonage under two jemadars and seven duffedars, while a separate country police of 40 men was maintained in the vicinity of the tin mines, funded from the 13¼ per cent tithe on the mines [1, p. 280]. The country police were stationed at Bukit Bedarra, Pondoh Compass, Machap, Gading, and Durian Toongal, with a Constable in overall charge [1, p. 279]. Resident Councillor Ferrier reported in 1853 that the presence of a police station at Pondoh Compass had directly stimulated an increase in rice cultivation and the settlement of new families in that district, attributing the growth to the security afforded [1, p. 278]. The same year, however, the station was attacked three times at night, the last occasion resulting in the wounding and probable death of one of the attackers when the swivels were brought into play [1, p. 278].

The Malay States: From Mercenary Force to Civil Institution

The policing of the Malay States followed a different trajectory, shaped by the particular conditions of the tin-mining frontier and the absence of any pre-existing colonial administrative infrastructure. In Selangor, the situation in 1875 was one of complete institutional collapse. Henry Charles Syers, a former private in the 10th Regiment of Foot, arrived at Klang to find the mercenary force undisciplined, unpaid for up to four years, opium-addicted, and without uniform or coherent command [2, p. 10]. Under the direction of Resident J. G. Davidson, Syers dismissed the worst elements, reducing the force to approximately 50 men, then recruited about 150 Malays from Malacca, equipped and drilled them, and deployed detachments as garrisons at key coastal and riverine points [2, pp. 10]. The arrears of pay, amounting in some cases to three or four years, were settled by promissory notes that the men “disposed of for merely nominal sums,” revealing the bankrupt credit of the Selangor government [2, p. 10].

The immediate test of the reconstituted force came in October 1875, when Sutan Puasa, a former leader of the Sumatran Malay community in Kuala Lumpur, seized Ulu Langat village and the mining camps of Cheras and Kajang. Syers led an advance party of 75 police and 100 Malay irregulars, joined forces with Yap Ah Loy’s 200 Chinese fighters at Kuala Lumpur, and in a coordinated operation with Davidson’s artillery detachment surprised and captured Sutan Puasa at Kajang, ending the insurrection [2, pp. 12–13].

Syers’ key organisational innovation was the dispersal of police into small outstation posts throughout the interior, a method that Swettenham had explicitly argued against in his 1876 memoranda on Perak police organisation [2, pp. 23–25]. Swettenham’s position was that police stationed in Malay villages would create a conflict of authority with the penghulu, and that “the power of the headman must always give way before the power of the police” [2, p. 24]. Syers’ practice demonstrated the opposite: victims lodged complaints directly at local police stations, and the mere presence of small detachments deterred crime [2, pp. 24–25]. When Swettenham audited Selangor’s accounts in 1878–79, he tacitly endorsed the system, recognising that Selangor’s fragmented, clannish Malay society could not sustain the indirect channel of communication through traditional authority that his own theory required [2, pp. 23–25]. The Selangor police strength grew from approximately 150 in 1875 to 660 by 1894, of which about one quarter were Sikhs, with 29 outstation police stations occupying positions commanding principal highways and mining centres [2, p. 40].

In Perak, the security problem was of a different order, driven by the explosive growth of the Chinese population following the Pangkor Engagement of 1874. Captain Speedy enlisted 110 discharged sepoys at Calcutta in 1873 for the Larut police; by the end of 1874 the force had grown to 266 men, while the Chinese population of the Taiping area surged from 4,000 to 25,000 in twelve months [3, pp. 51–53]. The force, initially designated the Larut Police and Resident’s Guard, evolved through the Perak Armed Police (1877–1884) and the First Battalion Perak Sikhs (1884–1896) before becoming the Malay States Guides on 1 September 1896, with 18 officers and 600 non-commissioned officers and men organised into five infantry companies, one artillery company, and a depot company [3, pp. 59–60]. The Taiping riot of 3 October 1879, in which the Perak Armed Police killed 28 Chinese and wounded many others, illustrated the force’s dual role as both police and military: Resident Walker reported that the men fired “with the coolness and precision of the steadiest, best trained and most disciplined troops” [3, p. 58].

The decisive structural transformation came with the Federation Agreement of 1896, which provided the mechanism for separating the civil and military functions that had become unsustainable. The Guides took on purely military duties while the civil police function was absorbed into the newly created FMS Police, of which Syers was appointed the first Commissioner in August 1896 [3, pp. 69–70], [2, pp. 34–49]. Syers reorganised the Perak police and inspected the forces of all four States before his death on 14 July 1897, when he was killed by a seladang (wild buffalo) in Pahang [2, pp. 48–49].

Rural Policing and Community Organisation

The policing of the rural interior raised questions that no regular force could answer alone. In the Muda and Kreh districts of Province Wellesley, J. R. Logan documented a state of chronic insecurity by the mid-1860s in which gangs of armed Malay robbers, often led by panglimas credited with supernatural invulnerability, plundered villages with impunity, while Chinese shopkeepers, recently disarmed by the police, were left entirely defenceless [4, pp. 174–175]. The existing penghulu system proved structurally defective: headmen were appointed by penghulu besar without government authority, many were “of bad reputation, or unable to write,” and they had no systematic arrangements for united action. During the Penang disturbances, a requisition for 300 Malay volunteers yielded only about 120 men, accompanied by a disproportionate number of penghulu mukims [4, pp. 174–175].

Logan’s plan, submitted to the Lieutenant-Governor in August 1867, proposed a village-based volunteer police system that divided larger villages into kampongs (villages) of 20 to 30 houses, each headed by a katua besar (senior headman), a katua kecil (junior headman), and a kweang (messenger), with groups of adjacent kampongs forming dairahs (districts) under a penghulu besar and penghulu muda [4, pp. 176–177]. The penghulus would be appointed Constables under Section 21 of the Police Act of 1856, furnished with muskets and swords by government, and given written appointments under the seal of the Lieutenant-Governor. A system of alarm signals using gongs and wooden tong-tong drums, modelled on the Java police, would coordinate a “Hue and Cry” response across kampongs [4, p. 177]. Logan insisted the system be “totally disconnected with the mukims (parishes), mosques and jumahas (religious congregations)” to prevent religious leaders from acquiring a powerful parallel organisation [4, p. 176]. He also proposed a standing international commission with the Raja of Kedah’s penghulu besar at Kota to manage cross-border crime, cattle trespass, and ferry regulation [4, p. 178]. The enrolled male adult population numbered 3,663, representing a total population of approximately 20,000 [4, pp. 196–197]. Lieutenant-Governor A. E. H. Anson approved the plan in part on 30 August 1867, and Logan subsequently secured formal appointments from the Commissioner of Police by 15 October 1867 [4, pp. 178–179].

In Malacca, the 1875 disturbances between Chinese of different secret societies in the country districts demonstrated the limits of the regular force. The acting Lieutenant-Governor, C. B. Plunket, reported that “some of the most serious Chinese riots that have ever been known in Malacca” were in progress, and he was obliged as a temporary measure to detain and incorporate with the police both the Manila men on their way down from Sungei Ujong and the Arab force on their way up [1, p. 283]. A detachment of 200 men of the 3rd Buffs arrived immediately after this. The Ho Beng secret society appeared to have been the principal instigator, its headman being Mr. Chong Boon Swee, an interpreter in the Malacca Police Courts, who after being called upon for an explanation of his activities was transferred to Singapore or Penang [1, p. 283].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on policing in the region spans more than a century and reflects shifting priorities in both the subject matter and the interpretive frameworks applied to it. Dickinson’s 1941 article on the Malacca police was written by a senior Malayan civil servant with direct institutional knowledge, and it functions partly as an internal history for the Malayan police service and partly as a contribution to the colonial administrative record, with a clear interest in legitimising the police’s historical claim to the penghulu system and to frontier policing [1]. The article draws primarily on the Malacca police records and colonial correspondence, including Lewis’s 1827 census report, the Dutch “Orders to Penghulus,” and the despatches of Residents Garling and Ferrier [1].

Gullick’s 1978 study of Syers and the Selangor Police represents a significant shift in approach, moving from institutional chronology to the reconstruction of an individual career as a lens for understanding organisational development. The article draws heavily on the Bloomfield Douglas diary (1876–1882), which provides the most detailed contemporary record of Syers’ day-to-day activities and his relationship with the Resident, and on Syers’ own 1878 police report, submitted in response to Parliamentary questions and transmitted to the Colonial Office [2]. Gullick’s central thesis—that Syers’ lasting contribution was his pragmatic insistence that the police in a Malay State must be predominantly Malay and integrated into local communities as a civil instrument, a position that ran counter to the prevailing military-police orthodoxy of his contemporaries—introduced a historiographical argument about the proper relationship between the police and the Malay community that had not been explicitly framed in earlier accounts [2].

Bagoo’s 1962 article on the Malay States Guides, a revised version of his B.A. (Honours) thesis from the University of Singapore, addresses the complementary question of how a colonial security force evolved from an improvised police unit into a professional military regiment, and why that regiment was ultimately dissolved [3]. The narrative is built almost entirely from administrative records: Straits Settlements despatches, Perak Annual Reports, the Malayan Police Magazine, and Hugh Low’s Diary [3]. The article is one of the earliest dedicated institutional histories of a Malayan military force, predating the more comprehensive studies of the FMS Police and the Malay Regiment that followed in the 1970s and 1980s [3].

Logan’s 1867 memorandum, published posthumously in 1885, occupies a distinct position in the literature as a contemporary policy document rather than a retrospective history. It provides the most detailed account of the structural defects in the rural penghulu system and the practical challenges of policing a scattered agrarian population in the face of organised banditry and secret society violence [4]. The document also illuminates the broader colonial project of extending administrative penetration into the Malay interior, as Logan argued that the village organisation would serve as a channel for government communication with a population that otherwise knew “Kampani” only as a vague mythical entity, and would gradually educate the Malays in their legal rights and obligations [4, pp. 186–193].

Taken together, these records document a police institution that was never static but continuously reconstituted in response to the economic pressures of the tin boom, the security demands of a multi-ethnic frontier society, and the evolving relationship between colonial authority and Malay traditional structures. The debate between Swettenham’s theory of indirect policing through the penghulu and Syers’ practice of direct community integration remains the central historiographical question, one that the records show was resolved in practice long before it was resolved in principle [2, pp. 23–25].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. A.H. Dickinson (1941). The history of the creation of the Malacca police JMBRAS 19(2): 251–283. Read on JSTOR
  2. J.M. Gullick (1978). Syers and the Selangor Police, 1875–1897 JMBRAS 51(2): 1–57.
  3. Abdul Karim bin Bagoo (1962). The origin and development of the Malay States Guides JMBRAS 35(1): 51–94. Read on JSTOR
  4. J.R. Logan (1885). Plan for a volunteer force in the Muda districts, Province Wellesley, submitted to government by the late J.R. Logan in 1867 JSBRAS 16: 173–200.