It’s a ‘who dares wins situation’: ex-Singapore riot police officer

Whenever Roy Steven Danker was on standby as a riot police man in Singapore back in the 1960s, he would sleep in his boots waiting for the emergency bell to ring.
 
Doing so was a small discomfort for him because when riots were raging – and they frequently did at that time – riot squad officers sometimes had to go 72 hours without getting a wink.
 
Danker, now 68 years old, more than 40 years on from his time serving as a senior police officer in the then-named Riot Squad's Red Scorpions (Alpha Troops), still remembers spending full days running from place to place, armed with a wicket shield, a revolver, a baton and either a rifle or a gas grenade launcher, as he cordoned and rounded up rioters with nylon string.
 
"In those days, one person would arrest three to four people, and we had to use tear gas, while wearing respirator masks. That would send them haywire," he told Yahoo Singapore in a phone interview from Tanjong Pinang, Indonesia, where he now lives.

He said he faced "anywhere between 30 and 50" episodes of rioting and unrest in the roughly eight years he served (between 1964 and 1971) with the riot squad. Having lost around 10 of his good friends in the line of duty and himself having had numerous close brushes with death, the incidents then have burnt themselves into his memory.

Of these, he dealt with slightly fewer than 10 larger-scale riots, including the 1964 and 1969 racial riots, as well as what he calls the "Chinese school riots" around the middle of that decade.
 
He recalls one particular day when students took to Singapore's old District Court building at Empress Place, near Pickering Street, and he was among the first responders to the riot that started there.
 
"We were told that these are schoolchildren, do not use force on them," he said, adding that they were told to leave their sidearms and rifles inside the command vehicle that accompanied them. "There were a lot of girls, who took ground fresh chili and threw it at our faces… we were blinded, and then the boys took over, whacking us with sticks and poles. Thank God we had our helmets on," he added.

 
That day, he says he personally sustained injuries to his knees, back, spine and shoulders, while others were warded in hospital. He was fortunate enough to escape without any broken bones, but many of his colleagues, upon release, went right back to the streets and into the thick of the action.
 
"We didn't like staying in hospital or being out of action for long, really," he said. "Even if the doctor offered us one or two days' MC, we'd just take the medicine and go!"
 
When not dealing with an actual riot, Danker said the riot squad officers also did coastal patrolling and traffic policing.
 
"We did practically everything in those days," he said. "We were really the backbone of the Singapore police force."

Asked for his views on Sunday's riot in Little India, where about 400 South Asian workers mobbed a bus that ran over and killed an Indian national, Danker said he was shocked that so many police and emergency vehicles were damaged and burnt.
 
"I don't know what the procedure is now but our jobs were to protect lives and public property… we would have guarded the vehicles at all costs," he said. "Back then, we had lorry guards whose job it was to protect our command vehicles — when there was a threat (to the vehicles), they would sound a signal that would recall all of us to form up around the vehicles with our shields. We wouldn't have let that (the damage of police and emergency vehicles) happen."

That said, he hopes Singapore's current special operations command forces will learn from this and improve their approach should their services be required again in the future.
 
"It's a 'who dares wins' situation," he said. "If they ran forward with their shields and tear gas, they would have easily been able to throw them (the rioters) haywire, and prevent things from spiralling so far out of control."