HOW safe is it to live in Kuala Lumpur, or any other burgeoning urban centre in Malaysia for that matter?

If official statistics is to be believed, then our fast-growing and congested cities and large towns are certainly not very safe places to live in or visit. In any event, official figures merely confirm what ordinary urban citizens have suspected to be a fact of life for a long time.

Surprisingly, organised crimes are not that rampant. The underworld does exist, but unless you decide to borrow from the loan-sharks, or fail to service your car loan for three months consecutively, you can pretty much stay out of harm's way. It is the petty criminals and the drug addicts that you have to worry about. At least that is the general picture painted by the prime minister in a recent statement in Parliament.

According to the PM, criminal acts in Malaysia have indeed been rising at an alarming rate in recent years, from 149,042 in 2002, to 156,499 in 2004, and peaking at 198,622 in 2006. That means a sharp jump of 75% in crimes in the 4 year period between 2002 and 2006!

Just imagine! In last year alone, there were 198,622 crimes in the country, with the same number of victims. If you count the family members of the victims as co-suffers of the crimes, then one million Malaysian were victims of criminals of all types in one year alone. That is an amazing number of people directly affected by criminal activities, considering that we are a small nation of only 26 million people.

According to the PM, Selangor tops the list of criminal hotbeds with 54,270 crimes, or 27.32% of the national total. The other regions known for high crime rates are: Johore (28,499); KL (25,230); Penang (16,229). Small and agrarian Perlis had the lowest crime rate in the country, at 839 crimes last year.

Among the great majority of crimes in the country, the most widespread incidence of loss of property involves motor-cycle thefts. The other most common crimes are house break-ins, armed or unarmed robberies, snatch thieveries, and petty thefts.

Gruesome fare of horrific acts

What must strike terror into the heart of the fairer sex is the report that rape cases have jumped 70% in the past five years. On the average, 6.8 women are raped in Malaysia every day of the year!

The problem is especially acute in Kuala Lumpur and the entire hinterland loosely referred to as Klang Valley. They may be divided into separate areas for the purpose of statistical categorisation, but local residents make no distinction between the two.

Every day, the print and electronic media serve up a gruesome fare of horrific acts of violence and debauchery in the Klang Valley throughout the year, every year. We know it is not mere media hype aimed at improving sales, because for local residents, crimes are all around them. If they are lucky enough not to have been robbed or beaten up once, they know of a friend or a relative who has not been so lucky. (I was mugged in PJ once.)

A senior journalist at malaysiakini and a long time friend said that he has had two cars stolen from him, one after another, incurring a loss of about RM40,000 for the poor fellow. In this part of Malaysia, you cannot go anywhere without a car. So you can imagine the nightmarish inconvenience that he suffered from car thefts like that.

I moved into this brand new housing estate in Cheras barely three years ago, and so far, we have been spared. Then, a few months ago, the young and friendly owner of the neighbourhood mamak restaurant was killed on the premises by unknown parties for unknown reasons.

Then, the Chinese business people in the neighbourhood shops begin to murmur and whisper about Indian gangs demanding protection money.

Police presence is minimal, if not entirely non-existent. This is why it has now become a vogue among local residents to form their own neighbourhood association and hire their own security personnel. Many security firms have since mushroomed to meet this need, and they provide guards to patrol the neighbourhood, and even put up gates to control the coming and going of traffic in the area.

Private vigilante army

Unfortunately, the practice of pagar makan padi has become a national culture in Malaysia. The so-called security guards themselves can easily become the primary security risk. I suspect that people hired by these security firms have not been recruited and trained with the most stringent standards. Those around my neighbourhood look positively koyak !

One such security guard told me he made RM750 a month. When you pay peanuts, you end up getting monkeys only.

It is interesting to note that, whenever there is a heist in town in which cash has been robbed from a security van, the first suspicion is that it must be an inside job. Then, of course, we have the most recent scandal at TAR College where a young student was almost raped by a security guard. It turned out that the security guard in question is not even 18 yet!

Therefore, all kinds of security services selling sophisticated lock and electronic alarm systems have become a booming industry. All these gadgets though will not deter a determined and smart criminal. In a way, it is good that the gun control laws are so strict, or else every home owner would be tempted to keep an AK47 or a Magnum in his house! People may even form their private vigilante army to clean up the street.

Public security and personal safety must rank as one of the highest concerns in urban living. People in the Klang Valley especially women and the aged must live in constant fear of the unexpected violence that can descend upon them in the flick of an eyelid.

Naturally, the police have become the object of criticism, resentment, and suspicion. In fact, the statistics may not reflect the true extent of how crimes have infested our society. The hustle of making a police report at the local police station is enough to keep away the victims of criminals. There is also this widespread reservation about the ability of the police to solve crimes anyway, and so the victims of minor crimes just shrug their shoulders and try to forget their misfortune, rather than going to the police.

This is why it is so important to have a modern, well-equipped, well-trained, clean, professional, and efficient police force that go out of their way to earn anew the confidence and good will of the public and re-establish their public credibility. Without co-operation and information from a civic-conscious citizenry, there is not much that the police can do to reduce the high crime rates in the Klang Valley and elsewhere. The Rakan Cop project is a good start towards this direction.

Too much power and bribery

Our Malaysian police force is one of the premier institutions in the country. It has been accorded a great deal of power and prestige in preserving law and order through the early period of our independence, especially in combating a very serious insurgency. Nobody can deny the contribution of the countless policemen serving in the rank and file of the force in our half-century experiment with nation-building.

Unfortunately, over the past few decades, the police force has been thoroughly corrupted by too much power and bribery, as well as the politicisation of an institution which is supposed to be absolutely neutral in all things related to party politics. It is in dire need of a complete overhaul so as to reinvent and re-engineer its new identity in a rapidly changing world.

Naturally, in such a large, long established, and complex organisation like the police department, the internal resistance to change must also be considerable. All huge institutions tend to be fossilised over time.

That is why much opposition has come from within the police force to the proposal to set up an independent commission to oversee the conduct of policemen and to deal with public complaints about them. Police people are very territorial, and they resent outsiders stepping into their turf. It means a loss of power.

The new IGP has also asked for the salary scale for the police to be reviewed.

For once, I agree with the IGP. The starting salary for a new constable is less than RM800 per month. That is less than the salary of an illegal worker working as a coffee shop waiter. Nobody can live in KL on that kind of pay alone. The temptation to demand bribe must be great.

Perhaps, with some skilful negotiation, the entire police force will begin to accept the idea of an independent commission to supervise their management and operation, if an attractive pay package is also offered to them at the same time. Then, ordinary tax-payers will have a solid foundation to demand a higher professional standard from the guardians of law and order.

Then, this nightmarish fear of becoming victims to criminals may be alleviated.