Thursday, August 03, 2006

Police must manage their human resources professionally and empower their investigation officers with more power to curb crimes in their locality.

DAPSY and DAP PJ Action Team would like to express our deepest condolences to the family members of Lee Khian Yip.

Recently, there have been outpours of anger and outrage from the public which can be seen in a lot of dialogue between the people and the police as well as public gathering organized either by the media or by public organizations. The outrageous emotion as witnessed in a lot of such dialogue can only be interpreted as a sign of public intolerance against worsening public security in their residential areas as well as their working places.

These emotions should not be washed off as merely some outburst of angers but there must be some actions to be taken from the authority to restore a safe and secure environment for the people, regardless of races, religions and regions.


Although MCA has mentioned that they will explain to KTAR students of how to protect themselves from criminals and snatch thieves, such move does not solve the problem in the long run. As long as there are still inefficiency in the Police Force, the situation will not get any better. So to say, if we need to restore public safety, the police will still play a vital role in curbing crime rate in the country.

Even though MCA Youth Chief Liow Tiong Lai said that MCA Youth will deploy their 100 of their action team members to patrol ‘black areas’, there are also questions of whether they can cover all the black areas in town? Can MCA Youth send another 50 members to patrol high crime rate area like Petaling Jaya? Who will be looking after the safety of the action team members? By deploying their MCA members to look after the safety of the public is not different from proclaiming to the world that the Malaysian Police has failed in keeping social order of the society.

It is the will of DAPSY that the police should play a pro-active role in curbing crime rates. The Inspector-General of Police Bakri has mentioned during the National Police Day on 25th March that out of 157459 criminal cases in 2005, violent crimes has come about 14.6% of the total crimes recorded and the rest are commercial crimes. Snatch thefts has dropped 16.63%.

In terms of curbing criminal activities, DAPSY would like to propose the police force to look up to the operation of New York Police Department whereby the department has succeeded in turning New York from a city of criminal activities to a safe city, thanks to the efforts of the previous New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, which incorporated CompStat system which empower police officers in precinct level to deal with local dynamics when comes to handling criminal activities in their area concerned. The system will also provide crime mapping analysis for the all police officers in New York to combat criminal activities by studying the behaviors of criminal activities in their areas concerned.

Unfortunately, this has not been in place in Malaysia and what is more worrying is that out of the 90,000 strong police force in Malaysia, only 7% of them (or about 6000) are deployed to resolve criminal activities whereas the rest are involved in handling non-police tasks such as administration, clerical works and works of the Special Branch. This is of course a blatant waste of human resources.

Besides having public partner programmes like ‘Rakan Cop’, increasing patrol frequency and building more pondok polis, the police must also adopt a more professional approach in managing human resources among the force. It is also recommended to the police that it is important for the people in a particular area to know who are the police officers on duty that particular day, and there shall be periodic announcement of criminal activities took place in a particular area so as to aware the public of the happenings. This shall slowly evolve into a comprehensive and integrated system which enables close working relation between police officers in a locality, police officers in the headquaters as well as residents in a particular area.

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