Speech

at the second supplementary budget
by Chow Kon Yeow

(Parliament, Thursday):The government has been propagating that Chinese are not interested to join the police force because of brighter prospects in other fields.I think this is a myth.

According to the Police Force Commission yearly reports, close to a thousand Chinese men and women applied to join the police force yearly, either as cadet ASP, Probation Inspector or Constables.

For the period of 2002 to 2004, a total of 1564 Chinese applied to join as cadet ASP and Probation Inspector. But only 157 of them were called for interviews and of these 56 were appointed. This works out to be a low 3.5 percent of the total number f applicants.

It was slightly better in the Constable category when 230 (15.5%) of the 1481 Chinese applicants were appointed to join the force.

Obviously, it is not true that Chinese are not interested to join the police force. Despite the low number of Chinese applicants as compared to other ethnic groups, a rather low number of them were eventually appointed.

We need a Malaysian’s police force and there should be a special programme to increase the number of Chinese officers and rank and file.

Be worried? 6.5 cases of rape everyday in Malaysia

The Police announced the Crime Index for the months of January and March 2006 and it is worrying 56,116 criminal cases were recorded in just three months.

There were 12,210 cases of violent crimes, 36,960 cases of property crime (including 14,937 cases of snatch theft), 1,731 commercial crime and 5,215 narcotics crime.It is alarming to note that 586 cases of rape and 478 cases of outrage of modesty have been recorded in this period.

This works out to 6.5 cases of rape and 5.3 cases of outrage of modesty every day!Rape cases have increased from an average of 4 cases daily a few years ago to 6.5 cases daily now.According to women NGOs, for every case of reported rape, there could be 4 cases that are not reported.

The high number of snatch theft (with many victims losing their lives) has instilled a sense of fear and lack of security among the citizens and tourists.We can no longer feel safe in our towns and cities, women and men, young and old, regardless of our class or creed.

 We call for better policing to keep our environment free from crimes.