PETALING JAYA, Aug 26 — The Home Ministry should stop harping on the now-repealed Emergency Ordinance (EO) and focus on improving the police force to deal with organised crime, the DAP said today.
The opposition party’s national publicity secretary Tony Pua (picture) said today that Home Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has nothing to support his call for the return of preventive laws, especially after it was shot down by Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail.
Pua pointed out that Gani had revealed at a recent forum by the Malaysian Crime Prevention Foundation that of the 1,567 investigation papers submitted on violent crime since the repeal of the EO in 2011, none showed evidence that they were committed by former EO detainees.
“The Attorney-General didn’t even try to mince his words to say that there was ‘only some’ or ‘very little’ evidence of former detainees committing these crimes. He said ‘there was no evidence’,” Pua said in a statement.
Ahmad Zahid and the police have been pushing for a new security preventive law to replace the EO, which they argue will help deal with the rise in violent and organised crime that has struck the nation over the past several weeks.
The home minister also announced recently that he will present crime statistics in Parliament when the Dewan Rakyat resumes meeting next month, to justify the need for EO-like preventive laws, and which allow the police to detain suspects without trial for up to two years.
He said the statistics — which he claimed were derived from a study on the current crime wave — showed that 90 per cent of crimes were committed by former EO detainees who have since been released following the repeal of the law.
Pua said Ahmad Zahid’s 90 per cent claim was “fictitious”, pointing to data published by the police, which he said showed clearly that the EO had not succeeded in curbing criminal activity.
“Unlike Datuk Seri Zahid who seems to have trouble coming up with concrete statistics, we have shown using past published police statistics have shown [sic] that the EO was completely ineffective in fighting rising crime.
“For example, the Malaysian crime index was rising rapidly from 2003 to 2008. At the peak, with the crime rate rose by 34.0 per cent from 2004 to 2007. During this period, the EO was readily available at the police’s disposal and yet crime was seemingly unstoppable.”
Pua added that if the police need a preventive law to deal with allegedly known criminals, it only proves that the country is suffering from having a police force that is “totally incompetent”.
“With the damning evidence by the A-G, we call upon the Home Minister to heed Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s advice when he announced the repeal of the EO, that ‘now police must train themselves how to look for evidence’,” he said, referring to the prime minister.
“Instead of just catching suspects and chucking them into EO detention, Datuk Seri Najib asked the police to now ‘provide evidence to charge them in court’,” Pua added.
