Pemandu’s Reducing Crime NKRA director Eugene Teh Yee has released encouraging figures that showed the country’s crime index had fallen by 10.1 per cent between January and May this year.
According to the figures, there were just 63,221 reported cases during the period, compared with 70,343 during the same time in 2011.
“The NKRA’s focus on bringing down the crime rate in the last three years has achieved big wins yearly since we first began the Government Transformation Programme and the trend seems to be continuing,” he said.
Index crimes such as theft, robbery, assault and murder are down and street crimes dropped by nearly 40 per cent between 2009 and last year to just 22,929.
Teh also revealed the total sum that had been spent by the Government on publicising the work of the police and getting accurate figures out to the public to show the results that their hard work was having.
Performance Management and Delivery Unit, Prime Minister’s Department had only allocated 0.75 per cent or RM1.8 million of the GTP fund for public awareness and media exercise.
“Our role is to ensure that this data is available, consistent and transparent to the rakyat. To this effect, we obtain the statistics from the police and then release the statistics to the media on a monthly basis,” he said.
The figures were released partly in response to the outlandish claims from Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail.
In a bizarre statement to a news conference, the PKR President claimed on Tuesday that Putrajaya had spent 71 per cent of the Government Transformation Programme fund on public relations.
Rather than damage public perceptions of the Government, as was presumably her intention, the claims have instead backfired on her giving an indication of just how desperate the Opposition is to reclaim lost ground.
“Datuk Seri Wan Azizah could have verified her facts before passing false statements to the media which are meant to mislead the Malaysian public on the actual work and progress made under the Reducing Crime NKRA (National Key Result Areas),” Teh said.
“Initiatives under the Reducing Crime NKRA include a visible and increased police presence especially in identified crime hotspots (including redeployment),” he said.
“As an example, before, 2,892 police personnel in KL were assigned evenly to 501 sectors for patrolling. These same numbers of policemen are now focused on 11 crime hotspots, allowing for a significant increase in police presence in areas where it is needed,” said Teh, giving Wan Azizah the benefit of doubt.
“We believe that Wan Azizah mistakenly considered the cost for putting police officers on the ground as the costing for a PR exercise,” he suggested.