Kit Siang questions IGP's explanation - Star

Dec 3, 2008 By LOH FOON FONG

KUALA LUMPUR:

DAP Parliamentary Leader and Ipoh Timor MP Lim Kit Siang has taken the Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Musa Hassan to task for trying to explain the worsening crime index by claiming that it is purely a problem of misperception.

Lim called on Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat MPs to take a common stand in Parliament on Wednesday to reject Musa’s explanation.

Over the weekend, Musa and deputy IGP Tan Sri Ismail Omar said that the latest statistics showed the crime index in Hong Kong, Japan and Australia were worse than the figures in Malaysia.

“What is outrageous is that the Cabinet and the National Economic Council (NEC) could be browbeaten so easily by the IGP on Tuesday to accept such a ‘ploy’, to the extent that this has been adopted as the official policy position as publicly enunciated by the Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak on Monday,” he said.

Musa said that figures show that Malaysia is a relatively safe country with 772 crimes for every 100,000 residents in the country and this ratio compares favourably with Hong Kong where there were 1,166 cases for every 100,000 residents, Japan with 1,569 cases and Australia with 4,470 cases.

Lim said the statistics were misleading.

For instance, Malaysia has 90.49 cases of robbery per 100,000 compared with 4.78 cases in Japan, 17.56 in Hong Kong while homicide was 2.12 per 100,000 population compared with 1.09 cases in Japan and 0.26 cases in Hong Kong, he said.

Rape per 100,000 population in Malaysia was 11.47 compared with 1.62 in Japan and 1.54 in Hong Kong.

“How could the IGP be so irresponsible as to mislead the Cabinet and the NEC to believe that Malaysia is safer than Japan and Hong Kong?” he said.

On Tuesday, Lim had said that instead of fighting crime, the Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak was trying to fight the people’s perception.

While Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had acknowledged five years ago that crime incidents in the country was serious, Najib was denying it when figures had even soared higher than it had five years ago, he said.