Imagine my shock upon reading front page news reports two days in a row in The Star , where the home minister and his deputy made a blunder over the same statistics.

Under an article headlined 'Wanted: More cops' on June 28, Deputy Home Minister Chor Chee Heung was quoted as saying that the ratio of policemen to population in Malaysia is 1:3000, compared to 1:250 in other countries. As such, there is an urgent need to beef up the police force.

The next day, the newspaper ran another report under the headline : 'Bigger force'. This time, it quoted Home Minister (and Deputy Prime Minister) Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as saying that the government had decided to increase the intake into the police force by 23,000, to add to 80,000 personnel currently.

Badawi said: "Currently, the ratio is one police officer to 3,000 people but in developed countries, the ratio is one to 300 people. We will work towards the ratio in developed countries".

So, according to both, our poor policemen are heavily understaffed and terribly overworked, each having to look after 10 times as many people as in other countries. No wonder our crime rate has climbed so high. Right? Wrong!

Every student can do simple arithmetic to divide a population of 24 million by 80,000 police personnel and arrive at the answer of 300 people per policeman.

Hence, the correct ratio is 1:300, not 1:3000; and our police force is certainly not grossly undermanned when compared to other countries as claimed by the home minister.

The shocking part is not that someone made an error of counting the digits wrongly, but how such a serious blunder could have gone unnoticed the first time - and then be repeated the next day.

Worst still, the home minister seems to have used the grossly exaggerated statistics (exaggerated by 10 times!) as the basis to back a sudden decision to expand the force by almost one third its current size.

Something must be terribly wrong with this country. Two things must be highlighted here:

First, what have we become a country of sheep, where everyone has become so tame that he accepts without question anything spewed out by the leaders and trumpeted by the dutiful press?

Second, the manner in which such a momentous decision (to expand the police force) was made is outright ridiculous.

This important decision appears to be a knee-jerk response to a public outcry over the recent spate of serious crimes. It was made abruptly without public consultation and without proper analysis of the situation and, above all, without an honest and objective appraisal of our police force.

For a start, our leaders were already misguided by a grossly skewed ratio to jump to the conclusion that our police force is heavily under-manned.

Is this really true? Reformists and their supporters who have experienced brutal suppression at the hands of the police would say 'No'..

Neither would political observers, local and foreign, who have been impressed by the efficient manner with which the police have succeeded in clamping down on the reformasi movement, both on and off the streets. In fact, suppression has been so effective that the reformasi movement is almost crippled.

Skeptics are not convinced that our police is lacking in numbers, based on foreign news reports of the nationwide demonstrations to observe the date former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim was jailed in 2000.

On that occasion, the police were so abundant in numbers and so well armed and equipped that they were able to man roadblocks at all the strategic locations in the country and succeeded in intimidating the dissenters into submission. According to some foreign journalists, there seemed to be more uniformed police personnel than there were demonstrators in the streets of Kuala Lumpur.

Since our police force is not lacking in numbers, why has our crime rate spiralled so alarmingly? The answer: prevailing corruption and a general lack of dedication.

Most victims of crime who have sought police help would be able to express their frustration with lackadaisical police response. Increasingly, the police are seen as a self-serving force lording over the people, motivated more by the desire to seek side incomes than to serve the people.

This sad malaise seems to be the common thread among all corrupt autocracies. As the corrupt autocrat increasingly relies on police collusion to unconstitutionally sustain his political survival, the police force naturally takes on a life of its own exercising extra-constitutional powers and becoming increasingly fearless of disciplinary action.

This is the reason why senior police officers are rarely prosecuted in a corrupt autocracy. Besides, who are the political leaders to accuse the police of corruption when they themselves are seen to be corrupt and exempted from prosecution? Don't these corrupt leaders need police complicity to cover up their own corruption?

The current drive to recruit additional police personnel to curb serious crimes is an exercise in futility, just as the current plan to implement the so called 'national service' to overcome racial polarisation and disaffection is a meaningless operation.

For these measures are only minor and superficial treatment of the symptoms, not the real cure for the illness. So long as our political leadership remains corrupted and autocratic, the police will not become clean and dedicated.

And so long as the ruling party Umno is determined to keep the racial barriers fortified among the races and to practise sweeping racial discrimination unrelentingly, this nation will not see national integration.

These superficial solutions to our problems are no doubt annoying. But what is even more alarming is the growing culture of Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's leadership to throw big money on solutions to national ills without proper study.

By dramatically expanding the police force - for which, no doubt, another few hundred million ringgit will have to be allocated every year - will we solve our problem? As explained previously, this is more likely to be wishful thinking.

Keen political observers of Mahathir's leadership may have noted that this tendency to spend big on false cures for national ailments is not a recent phenomenon, but an insidious trait that started a decade ago when Mahathir started to build his now famous mega-projects.

Foreign observers were then puzzled as to why an intelligent leader like Mahathir could commit colossal sums without batting an eyelid, on a string of mega projects with dubious economic and financial returns.

Part of the answer is perhaps found in a speech delivered by Mahathir when he opened the Petronas Twin Towers several years ago.

He confided that he needed to build the world's tallest building so that people living in a small developing country like Malaysia could stand tall and be rid of their inferiority complex.

The Twin Towers look impressive, but the tragedy is that this so-called good intention for the people has turned into an obsession for recognition to the point of squandering billions and diverting major resources in pursuit of form instead of substance.

To a large extent, the recent spate of big budget allocation for the teaching of English, national service and beefing up of the police force is but a continuation of Mahathir's mega project trend: high in cash outlay, low in returns.

Our earnest question is: when will all this end?