Police affairs under State Government if crimes in Selangor not improving

Of late, police has been suppressing peaceful gatherings in a very high-handed manner. Two days ago, police even raided the DAP headquarters without any valid search warrant. Meanwhile, crime rate in Selangor does not seem any sign of significant improvement. Police still facing acute shortage of manpower.

While the police is facing such problem, one would wonder why they could still mobilize the entire battalion to suppress peaceful gatherings, some not even exceeding 50 people in number?

I observed that for the past few months, gatherings or even possessions organized by Selangor UMNO were not treated nicely by the police but the police were not seen on the spot to monitor their events. In other hand, peaceful gatherings by Pakatan Rakyat on various issues seemed to have received entirely different treatment from the police force, to the extend that some elected representatives were assaulted by the police.

When the police has not been effecting in combating crime and continue to face the problem of acute shortage of manpower, resulting in alarming crime rate, civilians have worked together to employ security services, fence-up their community and set-up barricade at entrances of their community, though such actions are illegal under the act.

At the local council’s level, some local councils with strong financial backup has applied officially from the police to setup their own auxiliary police force. Such initiative from the council is to assist the police in reducing crime rates. Paper works started as early as one year ago but the council is still waiting eagerly for the final approval from Bukit Aman Police Headquarters. This is the cause of the delay in starting up our auxiliary police force.

What is more astonishing is that the Selangor Chief Police Officer (CPO) Dato’ Khalid Abu Bakar openly fired the State Government January this year that the Pakatan-led government is non-cooperative with the police.

I wish to stress that enough is enough. 

For the past few years, we have been asking the police to improve their manpower, setting up IPCMC, discharging their duties according to universal human rights accord. Unfortunately, it seems like the police does not heed our requests even when some of these requests were proposed by SUHAKAM.

Since the state government and local councils are willing to take up the police force, and the federal government failed to show any significant improvement in fighting crime, why not the federal government delegates the power to the state government in running the state police force, allocating funds to each state to run their police force according to the number of police personnel in their states respectively while maintaining an Investigation Bureau at the federal level, coordinating intra-state crime-combating investigations?