A few weekends ago, my housing community had a dialogue between our residents association and the chief inspector of police responsible for my area.

It was a good effort by my residents association to organise such a forum on security issues as it gave us a chance to get feedback direct from ‘the horses mouth' as it were.

What surprised me was that the chief inspector could hardly speak English, and in spite of the crowd being more than 80 percent non-Malay and of the older generation, he ended up answering all questions in the national language.

Nothing wrong with this as Bahasa Malaysia is our national languagebut this resulted in more than half the attendees struggling to make out what he was saying. Some flexibility would have helped, but I guess this was a weakness on both sides.

What further perplexed me was that when we asked for services such as additional road blocks to curb snatch thefts in the area and to beef up police patrols to deter house break-in's etc, the response was lukewarm with excuses like that he didn't have enough personnel or couldn't spare the personnel or that he just didn't have enough patrol cars.

Apparently there are only 3-4 patrol cars to cover an area of four zones. I fully understand the restrictions that our chief inspector is facing, we hear of this all the time - that the police just don't have enough personnel.

And I'm not surprised that bureaucracy and red-tape is probably one of things he struggles with as he tries to seek more resources to keep his jurisdiction safe.

The irony is that you also read about the police spending their time and resources on less life- threatening affairs such as raiding cars and homes for pirated CDs, escorting VIP's all over town and cracking down on peaceful protestors.

This is not to mention all the police resources used to cover our numerous by-elections. After that dialogue with the chief inspector, as courteous as he was, I didn't feel any safer.

In fact, my fears have increased as he couldn't satisfactorily answer most of our important questions or agree to the simplest security requests that we asked for.

It is no wonder that many suburban communities in the Klang Valley are hiring their own security guards and fencing up their neighborhoods.

Are the criminals overtaking the authorities in terms of ‘smarts' and capability that we, the ‘rakyat', have to resort to protecting ourselves with our own money?

What about those who cannot afford the private security services? The cops that attended our dialogue gathering with the chief inspector were warm and friendly; that's fantastic, and they even offered us their mobile numbers to call in case of emergencies.

But somehow, when I consider the whole scheme of things that is happening in our great nation, I don't feel any safer.