PETALING JAYA, July 9 ― Police statistics showing crime fell after the Emergency Ordinance was repealed have cast doubt over the narrative that the loss of powers to detain suspects without trial has caused a surge in crime, a DAP lawmaker has said.

The party’s national publicity secretary, Tony Pua, highlighted that despite the repeated attempts to pin concerns over crime on the repeal of the colonial-era law, criminal activity had peaked between 2004 and 2007 when the Emergency (Public Order and Crime Prevention) Ordinance had still readily been at the police force’s disposal.

“While we dispute the accuracy and completeness of the police crime index, the police themselves have presented that crime levels in 2012 was the lowest in a decade at 145,891 or a decline of 7.6 per cent from 2011,” Pua (picture) said in a statement yesterday.

“Most tellingly, the decline of crime, according to the police’s own statistics, was achieved despite the fact that the EO was repealed during the year.”

The federal lawmaker said even with the official storyline blaming recent crime on “hardened criminals” once held under the law, the police have not provided data linking now-released detainees to criminal activity.

“Despite all the sound and fury, the police have yet to present a shred of evidence that the recent spate of rising crime is due to ‘hardened criminals’ released from the Simpang Renggam detention centre,” Pua said.

“It does not appear that the police have caught anyone involved in the recent spate of armed robberies which points strongly to the repeal of the EO as being the ‘cause’.”

Pua later repeated his call for the police and Home Ministry to take up the prime minister’s challenge to improve policing instead of “crying” over the loss of preventive detention powers the law had previously granted.

He said the pining for the abolished law was because of the penchant to turn to the law when faced with the inability to solve crimes, pointing out to cases where detention without trial was used in cases as commonplace as motorcycle theft.

Barely a year after rescinding the colonial-era law, Putrajaya is now looking to introduce new legislation to provide for detention without trial whose removal authorities have blamed for the crime rate.

Police have sought to attribute complaints of rising crime to the repeal of the EO, but it is unclear which crimes have been directly linked to the released detainees.

When explaining the rationale for repealing the law last year, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the banishment powers it had offered was rendered obsolete by technology and that police must adapt to the new reality.

“In the old days, it was easy, if someone was bad, we just catch him and send him to places like Pasir Puteh, or maybe Jerantut,” Najib said in his keynote speech at a dialogue with civil servants by the Razak School of Government in July last year.

“But nowadays, it is useless as no matter how far you send them, with their cellphones, they can still do their work (commit crime).

“Now police must train themselves how to look for evidence.”

The EO was introduced in 1969 to deal with the May 13 riots and gave the police broad powers to detain individuals indefinitely without trial.

Authorities say the law had been reserved for “hardened criminals” and organised crime, but had used its powers against everyday snatch thieves and, most controversially, six Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) members including MP Dr Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj as they were headed for the 2011 Bersih rally.