Basket.

Thursday night and I'm once more the Ops TA, banging away on the keyboard while the DO watches TV and everyone else is someplace enjoying. A pleasant enough end to yet another mind-numbing day when boss was (once more) mysteriously absent.

With the kind of news that has been appearing in the papers lately, Singapore seems to have become all at once a more draconian and more dangerous place. A robbery last week in which a gun was used and fired was followed by a mafia-style "execution" yesterday and a man murdering his pregnant wife with a rusty sword early this morning. What's the world coming to? Two crimes involving firearms in less than a week? Amazing. And one a mafia-style murder too! How common is that? How common is two murders occuring less than 24 hours apart, for that matter?

Equally recent, far less sensational but somewhat more disturbing changes than this sudden spike in violent crime are also worthy of attention. Last week, the Government announced that exit permits will now be required for males aged 13 and up to leave the country for more than three months. The previous age limit was 16. While I applaud the Government's efforts to check NS defaulters, of which this measure is a part, I feel that it is a little too drastic. It makes me uncomfortable because it brings us that tiny step closer to being a police state - one more restriction on people leaving the country; restrictions on leaving the country being, of course, the hallmark of dictatorships. A tiny step nonetheless, but always be careful of the slippery slope.

And just today the Government puts out another measure, ostensibly to check youth crime - the police will from now be on the lookout for teenagers aged 17 and below out on the streets after 11pm. Any of these found will have their particulars noted and their parents informed via post. I do think the Singapore Police Force has better ways to spend their funding, because look here, exactly what is this going to achieve? Many of these teenagers can be out that late because their parents don't care anyway. What's a latter going to do. It will be the minority who are actually lying - and if they have to lie, they have strict parents who won't let them get into trouble anyway. It's unnecessary and restrictive - and it also means that you can fuck someone and have a child but can't be out on the streets after 11pm. Just like how you can die for your country before you can vote. That kind of thing. It's ridiculous. For heaven's sake just let our youth enjoy themselves.

So we have an interesting trend here: increasingly draconian police-state measures with a corresponding rise in violent crime.

I think the Singapore of the 1990s used to have a good mix: enough freedom but enough ludicrous measures for people to laugh at and ignore. Enough violence in our schools but not too much, such that students were more or less in line. Enough things against us being a dictatorship for us to argue convincingly that we were not one.

And we still aren't. Let's not become one. Stop the tinkering already.