Making the Invisible, Visible: The First Step...

The issue that our class is addressing is police corruption in Malaysia. It is important to resolve this issue because the police are supposed to be the people who are our role models, the people who keep peace. If they are corrupt, can we really trust them? Police corruption affects many people.  I think some of those who give the police officers' money don't realize they're not paying their fine; they're putting money into the police officer's pocket. I found it really surprising that so many police officers are involved with corruption. An article stated that there are 4,500 of 90,000 police officers involved with corruption. That's only 5% but 4,500 people is a lot. Studying this issue opened my eyes to the real world and that everything is not what it seems. Although I know more about police corruption now, I started off with pretty much no knowledge about police corruption, whatsoever. I knew that a lot of my family had experienced police corruption first hand, but I didn't know much about the whole system of police, and how many people were involved with corruption. The stations helped me get a general grasp about human rights and it helped my understanding grow. I'd studied human rights in 5th grade and 7th grade. This year, I feel like I fully understand them. Deciding on what to choose as a final topic was difficult because I wanted to go deeper into so many topics. It was interesting to hear everyone's opinions and reasoning for the topics they wanted to study most. I found the domestic workers' rights quite interesting but it's so important to have a good police system in Malaysia otherwise we can't do anything about many issues. For example, we can't help domestic workers if the police don't bother to do anything about it. In the end, I was satisfied with the choice that we'd made as a class. It was quite difficult to go through article after article, trying to find relevant information for our research topic. There are so many articles about police corruption, most of them being examples of police being fired or how much money they'd asked for. I couldn't find much about anything else. Using the school's resources helped a lot, though, otherwise it would have been crazy to search something up and find unlimited articles. The NoodleTools are very helpful because it's easier to gather information and cite the sources we used. I hope by the end of this unit, we will find ways for us to inform people about police corruption, so that something can be done to stop it.