I just walked back home from the shops on my own after dark. It was a completely innocuous experience, if anything I rather enjoyed it. I’ve never been able to say that with such certainty – in fact, in most parts of the developed world the statement is outside of the norm. Don’t we shroud ourselves in psychological armour when we step out of the house after dark? I know I do in London, but not here.
This is one of the best things about living in Singapore and for me it houses an important message. Every carefree step I take after dark, without fear, hammers the point home: that freedom to wander at whatever hour is something we should all be allowed to do: it is OUR RIGHT. Is any city ever really safe, though – hasn’t crime always been part of our lives? In the bubble that is Singapore it’s just not something you see very often.
I’m not saying life is a bowl of cherries out here, we know that sh@t does happen, that it’s not entirely an episode of Trumpton. Now and then you will see a propped up police placard asking for help with a ‘Housebreaking’ matter, or the bizarrely worded ‘Outrage of modesty‘. I’ve heard first-hand accounts of housebreaks, bicycle thefts, bag snatches, one or two sightings of odd blokes, such stories always accompanied by the phrase: low crime is not no crime. I can think of several friends who would be justified in jumping right onto this post and setting the record straight. More than one chatty cab driver has alluded to dark stories that confirm the cops do indeed have a job to do, more than rescuing cats from trees. Once me and SmallMonkey sat next to a nutter on a bus: but in reality he just wanted to chat… Still the rules and codes by which Singapore citizens must abide give the whole place a veneer of peaceful harmony, the bad stuff tucked away seemingly neatly and without fuss.
There’s a patch on my morning run that’s a bit deserted, no bus stops, the nearest HDB block set back from the main road and nothing more than a field of croaking bull frogs chirruping into the night. That’s about as spooky as it gets for me. I don’t want to think about the undercurrents too much, I just want to know what the model is for Singapore’s surface success, then bottle it and take it home.
Incidentally, have you been reading the wonderful books that are Inspector Singh detective stories? He’s a cop from Singapore (and the Indian heritage is sort of a passing nod to the melting, sizzling, roasting pan that is Singapore). There’s an element of comedy in it because most of his cases take him out of Singapore, but his reflections do shed light on the reasons for the relatively lower violent-crime rate in Singapore..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Singh_Investigates
How fantastic – Neha thank you so much. I’ll download one for my hols. Hope they don’t give me nightmares.
I love the safety here too. But I always have a bit of mixed feelings, realising that they do cane in Singapore for minor crimes, and have the death penalty for large ones… Is that the cost of this ‘freedom’? What especially spooks me it that these are things I am against, but now I see that they seem to work here… or it is something else?
So true-I appreciate walking on my own as well!
Karien, you never hear about those legendary penal beatings, though, do you, or people being lethally injected for crossing the road when the walking man is red – but perhaps that’s how they do it, keep the warnings mythological so that everyone is suspended in a state of low-level fear? Either way I just adore the after-dark thing, it’s been a really liberating experience for me. I might do it again tonight.