JULY 17 — They say the mark of a person’s character is not how he treats his betters, but how he regards those in a lower social station.

If that is true, then our national character is ugly indeed.

Feudalism and subservience has been hammered so much into our national character, we scrape and bow to politicians. We make way for them in traffic. We call them by their titles.

And we treat non-Caucasian foreigners, especially our neighbours, as somehow beneath us.

I am often mistaken for a Filipino, which means I get quite a bit of harassment... from the police. Once I went to a police station to report the loss of my passport and the officer on duty ignored me... until I flashed my IC.

“Oh, saya fikir kamu bukan orang sini.”

The average Malaysian also seems to think that most crimes are committed by foreigners. Nothing could be further from the truth.

That doesn’t stop our Malay media from calling black people “Awang Hitam” and regularly running stories about evil foreigners seducing our young women and operating scams.

Yet if you carefully look at our crime news and statistics, the fact is that most crimes (except in Sabah) are committed by locals.

But it is far easier, isn’t it, to pretend that it isn’t “our people” committing crimes?

Yet the matter remains that most rapes, burglaries, kidnappings, petty and violent crimes are committed by Malaysian citizens.

Why are our crime rates rising? It is simply because crime pays.

With a motorbike, a snatch thief could make more in a day than working at McDonald’s for a month. With rising prices and meagre income opportunities, not to mention stagnant wages, crime makes sense (if you don’t factor in things like ethics).

Our police force badly needs an overhaul but at the same time, so does our economy and society. As it is extremely unpractical to have one policeman for each citizen, there has to be other ways to address rising crime rates.

Don’t blame foreigners for our crime rates. Instead we have to ask ourselves, why is crime just too easy and too attractive a proposition?

But those aren’t the questions Utusan or Kosmo like to ask. They would prefer to find the next foreign man to write a salacious story about.

The Malaysian problem has always been our penchant to find someone to blame instead of identifying the root causes of a problem.

Whatever’s increasing our crime rate, let’s stop blaming the foreigners and look, for once, at ourselves.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.