PETALING JAYA, July 17 — The Home Ministry and Inspector-General of Police (IGP) should stop lobbying for more preventive detention laws and focus its energies on revamping the police force to improve crime-fighting efforts, DAP MP Tony Pua said today.

Commending Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail for saying yesterday that he would “never agree to preventive detention”, Pua (picture) said the authorities should finally accept the repeal of the Emergency Ordinance (EO) and stop “whining like cry babies”.

“The police must start to lose their dependence on the EO like a crutch,” the Petaling Jaya Utara MP said in a statement this morning.

“We would like to call upon the home minister and the IGP to accept the prime minister’s advice that ‘now police must train themselves how to look for evidence’.

“Instead of just catching suspects and chucking them into EO detention, Datuk Seri Najib Razak asked the police to now ‘provide evidence to charge them in court’,” he added.

Pua suggested that recommendations by the Tun Dzaiddin 2005 Royal Commission of Inquiry be implemented, such as shifting 22,000 police officers from non-crime-fighting divisions to take on crime-fighting duties.

He noted that the commission had found that a meagre nine per cent of the police force are placed in the criminal investigation department.

The others, he said, fill the spaces in the “internal security force” like the Federal Reserve Unit (FRU), Light Strike Force (LSF), General Operations Force (GOF) and other areas like the administrative, management and logistic units, which form a significant 40 per cent of the police force.

“The police force must also reallocate its officers to urban centres,” Pua said. “Currently despite the fact that urban centres are more crime prone than rural areas, the former receives proportionately less allocations than the latter.”

He cited Petaling Jaya as an example, saying the police to population ratio in the highly-populated city stands at 1:470, even though the national ratio is 1:270.

Pua also repeated the call to establish the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC), another recommendation by the commission that has been repeatedly shot down.

Civil society groups, politicians and the public revived demands on the government to set up the IPCMC to check police abuses after a spate of custodial deaths hit media headlines recently.

“With the rejection of the EO by the Attorney-General, we hope that the lobbying for its return by the BN hardliners will end,” Pua said.

“Countries such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the Western countries are able to keep crime at very low levels without unjust laws on preventive detention.”

Malaysia can be equal to the achievements of these nations, Pua added, stressing the need for the police to focus their duties on tackling crime and improving on their effectiveness and professionalism.

The Najib administration had announced it would repeal several colonial-era laws last year as part of its legislative reform initiative.

It got the ball rolling with the much-dreaded Internal Security Act (ISA) and the Emergency Ordinance (EO), which drew widespread condemnation as a political tool to curb dissent.

The ISA was replaced by the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act (Sosma), which the A-G pointed out prescribed detention but only for the purpose of investigation, effectively limiting the home minister’s discretionary powers.

But Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and the police have sought to attribute complaints of rising crime to the repeal of the EO, but it isunclear which crimes have been directly linked to the released detainees.

The minister reportedly said that statistics from a recent study showed that 90 per cent of organised crimes were carried out by the ex-detainees who were released from Simpang Renggam where they were held under the EO.

He said the figures justified the need to revive the EO or enact fresh Acts modelled after the same preventive detention law.

Pua disputed Zahid’s claims, however, pointing out that statistics from the police had also shown that despite the EO, the crime index had risen the fastest to its peak in 2008.

“At the same time, despite the EO’s repeal at the end of 2011, the government has insisted that crime rates were down in 2012,” he said.

Last week, former IGP Tan Sri Musa Hassan was quoted as saying in The Star Online that previous preventive laws had offered victims the kind of protection they need, including allowing them to give evidence without going to court.

Yesterday, IGP Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said the police are not seeking for more “preventive detention” laws but fresh “preventive laws” that could offer witnesses sufficient protection when dishing the dirt on criminals.

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.

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

Civil society groups and the Pakatan Rakyat lawmakers have also been lobbying the federal government to repeal the Sedition Act, criticising the 65-year-old law as archaic and another political tool to rein in disagreement.

Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz had announced last October the National Harmony Act would replace the Sedition Act. A recent spat among the Najib Cabinet members over its repeal had cast a cloud on the reform measure.

But Abdul Gani said yesterday that his team is in the middle of drafting the new law. He did not indicate when it would be ready to be presented to Parliament.