On a sultry morning last month our Macau apartment was burgled. It was bad enough to lose a laptop computer, mobile phone and handbag. But making it worse was the bureaucracy we had to go through only to obtain a police receipt, so we could make a claim for the lost items with the insurance company.
We called the emergency number, 999, and some plain-clothes police officers came and photographed the scene. They took the testimony of my flatmate, who gave them my phone number because I was absent from the house at the time. They promised to call soon to take my testimony. Then they left, leaving no receipt, no business card, no way of contacting them.
When no phone call came for a week, I telephoned the security police, hoping to offer my testimony. There are two police forces in Macau, the security and judiciary police, and they sometimes have overlapping powers.
The security police handle cases reported through the 999 emergency calls. But they referred me to the judiciary police, which handles all burglary cases - or so I was told. The judiciary police, however, said that since the plain-clothes officers did not take fingerprints at the scene, they could not be from the judiciary police force. Yet, the security police said any plain-clothes officers must belong to the judiciary police.
'It is common to wait three or four weeks while [either force] investigates a case,' said an officer of the judiciary police. 'Why don't you just wait patiently for a call from a police officer?'
Three weeks went by and we called the judiciary police again. Finally, we were told that in order to obtain a police report, we needed to go in person to the judiciary police headquarters.