For the past few years, the Prime Minister Najib Razak has been preaching to Malaysians the success of the government’s crime-fighting actions under the Government Transformation Programme (GTP).

Najib boasted of fantastic achievements when he announced under the 2011 GTP Annual Report that street crimes have been reduced by 39.7% while overall crime reduced by 11.1%. In fact, with the above “achievements”, PEMANDU under the purview of the Prime Minister’s office has proudly announced that Malaysia is safer than Singapore.

However, in recent months, the Crime Statistics produced by the Government has been found to be manipulated by reclassifying criminal cases as “non-index crime” as opposed to “index crime”. The Government as at this point of time, only publishes high-level “index crime” statistics while refusing steadfastly to provide “non-index crime” breakdown data.

The crime index mystery

I had in August last year discovered that while “index crime” has indeed fallen per the figures provided by the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM), “non-index crime” sky-rocketed.

There was a reduction in “index crime” from 209,572 in 2007 to 157,891 in 2011, or 24.7% over the period. However, this was achieved at the expense of the unpublished “non-index crime”, which increased from 42,752 to 72,106 or a massive 68.7% over the same period.

Most suspiciously, “non-index crime” is increasing annually as a proportion of total crime since 2007 based on PDRM data. It has increased from 16.9% of total crime in 2007 to 21.9% (2008) to 22.8% (2009) to 29.8% (2010) to a record of 31.4% in 2011.

Crime rate has gone up

Last month, crime watchdog MyWatch provided further proof that the crime rate had gone up in 2012, and furnished what it said was official police data to back up its claims that the national crime statistics had been manipulated.

“All these statistics have never been revealed to (the) public and were not mentioned in any crime index drop that was given by PDRM or Home Affairs Ministry,” said MyWatch chairman R. Sri Sanjeevan.

He said that the overall vehicle theft had in the July-September period in 2012 risen by 3.5 per cent, or 624 cases, in comparison with the same period in 2011. He also said that serious crimes such as criminal intimidation, kidnapping, extortion and causing grievous hurt are classified as non-index crimes, which are not included in the national crime statistics.

Minister now says statistics not important

In response, instead of clarifying the various damaging allegations of statistics manipulation above, the Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein rebuffed the critics by now saying “crime statistics is not important” per the report in The Malaysian Insider on last month.

On the one hand, the entire BN Government has based their entire achievement and “success” in fighting crime on the above statistics, on the other hand when statistics manipulation was discovered, the Home Minister is now saying that these very same figures are not important.

In doing so, Hishammuddin is telling Malaysians, the entire GTP report on Crime Fighting NKRA is based on fraudulent data and must be debunked in its entirety.

The above also proves that the Home Minister is a fraud himself for by making use of crime statistics which are “not important” and worse, manipulated to bluff Malaysians that the crime situation in the country has improved tremendously under the “transformation” leadership of Najib Razak.  -The Rocket