KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 4 — Putrajaya has gone overboard with its plan to intercept communications for intelligence that it hopes will arrest the climbing crime rate, several Pakatan Rakyat (PR) lawmakers have said.
Such a move was overkill in dealing with the spate of increasingly violent street crimes, they added while voicing scepticism that the “Big Brother” act would deter criminals.
The opposition legislators also suggested that in revising legislation to allow the authorities to practically spy on the public, the federal government was in effect arming law enforcers with powers to invade privacy and, worse, silence political dissent after having repealed draconian laws to free up civil liberties.
“It’s an overkill of massive proportion and a great danger to citizens,” Padang Serai MP N. Surendran told The Malay Mail Online while weighing in on the Najib administration’s recent announcement aimed at appeasing public alarm in the wake of brazen shootings and murders in broad daylight with the perpetrators still at large.
He believed the move would likely result in a loss of fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Federal Constitution.
“Interception of communication is a very serious infringement of people’s rights... It should be used with great care and only under judicial supervision,” he added.
Surendran, who is also a PKR vice-president, cast doubt the new provision to the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) would help law enforcers pre-empt criminal acts before they occur.
The government initiative would be more appropriate in dealing with extreme and serious circumstances such as terrorism, he said.
The lawyer claimed that most violent criminals were unlikely to work with high-technology instruments and would have many other ways of staying in touch in the underworld, pointing out a wrinkle to the government’s plans to intercept communications.
“I don’t think in the issue of crimes it is going to be very useful in preventing it,” Surendran said. “We’re not dealing with the al Qaeda here.”
PAS MP for Pokok Sena, Datuk Mahfuz Omar also voiced similar fears and warned the security measure may be misused by the authorities to spy on opposition politicians and other dissidents.
“In the end, it might cause erosion of privacy, and the worry here is that unrelated individuals’ communications might also get intercepted,” the Islamist party’s vice-president said.
Like Surendran, Mahfuz viewed the government’s communications tap to be a “ridiculous” way to deal with organised and violent crimes.
He was certain that hardcore criminals were clever and resourceful enough to hide their identities while communicating with their partners.
“If I were to go shoot and murder somebody, would I be telling everyone about it?” Mahfuz asked.
The Performance Management and Delivery Unit (PEMANDU) announced on Thursday the government’s decision to introduce new interim measures that allow law enforcers to tap into public communications and snap electronic tracking bracelets on criminal suspects while it draws up new laws to tackle the rising crime problem.
Mahfuz attributed the proposal to the federal government’s efficiency unit, and sneered at the initiatives as idealistic book solutions thought up by “armchair critics” that did not consider the real situation.
“I’m afraid that the PEMANDU people are all armchair critics. They just sit at their desks and think about the problems without actually observing the real situation on the ground,” he said.
To effectively tackle street crime and raise the public’s waning confidence, the government needed to beef up the number of police officers on patrol duty.
“We should increase the number of police, reduce the police-to-citizen ratio. This is the key to success in New York,” Mahfuz said.
According to a US news portal, AlterNet, the New York City Police Department — said to be the biggest police force in the US — has a uniformed force of about 34,000 officers to serve an estimated 8.3 million people in the cosmopolis, putting the police-to-population ratio at 4.18: 1,000 or roughly one policemen for every 250 people.
Malaysia’s national police-to-population ratio stands at 1:270 but DAP lawmaker, Tony Pua had recently highlighted that Petaling Jaya in his constituency had only one police officer for every 470 people, far higher than the national average.
Surendran also said the only way to resolve the crime spike is to raise the number of policemen, train them better, provide them with better resources so they can improve their efficacy in conducting investigations.
His fellow PKR colleague, Nurul Izzah Anwar, reiterated the call for a separate agency to monitor crime statistics, such as is done in the UK.
“In Malaysia, it is the police monitoring the police,” the Lembah Pantai MP told The Malay Mail Online.
Nurul Izzah, however, chose to reserve her opinion on the Barisan Nasional (BN) government’s spy move, saying she wanted to keep an open mind to any suggestion to combat the rising crime rate.
PR leaders have been lobbying Putrajaya to review its police manpower allocation and shift more officers to the cities where crime is more rampant.
The opposition has also pushed with civil rights groups for the establishment of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) to check police abuses, a suggested mooted in 2006 by a royal commission led by former Chief Justice Tun Mohamed Dzaiddin Abdullah.
Putrajaya and the police have repeatedly rejected the idea for the IPCMC, arguing that an oversight committee with such powers as proposed were “unconstitutional” and would seriously restrict the police in carrying out its duties.
The high-profile murder of Arab-Malaysian Development Bank (AmBank) founder Hussain Ahmad Najadi in a busy car park in the heart of Kuala Lumpur on July 29, three days after the attempted murder of anti-crime activist R. Sri Sanjeevan at a traffic light junction in Jempol, Negri Sembilan have heightened public alarm over crime levels.
Prime Minister Dartuk Seri Najib Razak had pledged his government’s commitment to consider “anything” the police needs to fight serious crime, noting the sudden rise in gun-related incidents lately.
This, he noted, would include providing extra powers under a new law that is expected to be tabled in the next Parliament session in September.
