When Mr Chan Soo Wah was a Secondary Four student, gangsters robbed him of his watch at knife-point. That encounter sealed his decision to join the Singapore Police Force.

Mr Chan, who joined in 1965 and retired in 1999 with the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police, was not looking for revenge. He was fascinated by the police officer who had handled his case.

"I was impressed with him. This investigator was thorough in his work," said Mr Chan, now 74.

Starting his career as a constable dressed in khaki shorts, he worked his way up the ranks, graduating from the police academy as an inspector and later moving to the Criminal Investigation Department's secret society branch.

Singapore's tough laws, namely the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act - known to some in Hokkien as "go chap go" (55, for Section 55 of the Act) - kept secret societies in check in the mid-1970s.

Mr Chan said Section 55 gave the police powers to detain a secret society member without trial. "That's how we broke the backbone of the secret society menace."

A decade earlier in the 1960s, tensions arose due to student protests, the communist threat and the post Konfrontasi era.

The police received frequent calls whenever the public spotted suspicious items. Mr Chan remembers one of these calls in 1969 vividly.

He was responding to a call in the evening about an abandoned shoebox left in front of a British company in Bukit Timah.

The young and tired probationary Inspector Chan had assumed it was just another bomb hoax and was about to kick the shoebox.

But an older Volunteer Special Constabulary officer, who was first at the scene, stopped him from doing so.

Luckily, Mr Chan listened to him because the bomb disposal unit later confirmed the box was rigged with explosives.

"I'm here today because I survived. He saved me."