By Tay Tian Yan, translated by Soong Phui Jee

I have a habit of finding out offenders’ or suspects’ racial identities first instead of the course of it when I read crime stories.

Just like reading a road accident news, I will take note of the car model first.

It might be considered not a good habit. Those adhering political correctness would say that crime is crime, it has nothing to do with racial background.

Or, they might say that it is a kind of latent racism that links crime to a particular race.

Just like an unwritten provision of the Home Ministry in the past, newspapers were not allowed to publish the racial identity of offenders or suspects.

I used to be a dissident at a dialogue with Home Ministry officials.

I said that the objective of the authorities was good. It was meant to avoid people from linking crimes to a particular racial group as the move might lead to the formation of racial prejudice.

However, hiding the racial identity of offenders or suspects was a move of concealing facts and even worse, it might affect readers’ judgements on social environment.

Readers must know the real situation to form environmental awareness and raise vigilance accordingly to protect themselves and their families.

Communication theory taught me so.

For instance, knowing the car models that always lose control and the roads having frequent accidents could help readers make reasonable prevention.

Appropriate and proper disclosure is good as stereotypes could be prevented only when errors are avoided.

For instance, people in the past always thought that theft, robbery and homicide involved mostly foreign workers, particularly those from Indonesia.

After the formation of such a stereotype, people try to avoid foreign workers and take a detour whenever they see foreign workers, as if they have hidden a parang behind their backs and would slash anyone near them.

However, statistics tell us that the ratio of crimes involving foreign workers is actually very low. In contrast, the ratio of foreign workers being robbed, cheated and abused is high.

Perhaps one day, we would no longer be able to recruit any foreign workers as they are safer at home and it is not worthy to risk their lives here.

Today, newspapers no longer hide the racial identity of offenders or suspects. We can now see more truth and most crimes are actually committed by Malaysian citizens.

Indian suspects are wanted by the police for involving in open robberies and cold-blooded murders. And the five gang members being shot dead by the police in a recent raid on an apartment are all Indians, too.

It made an impression that crimes involved a particular skin colour.

However, the arrested suspects believed to have involved in a series of shop robberies were Malays while the suspects of a bomb explosion incident that killed a primary a school clerk in Tumpat were also Malays.

Meanwhile, the suspect of shooting dead Ambank founder Hussain Ahmad Najadi is a Chinese man nicknamed Sei Ngan Chai while the three suspects, including a woman, being arrested for involving in the robbery cum murder of a beautician in Johor are also Chinese.

Crimes have nothing to do with skin colour. However, they have similar backgrounds originated from the deep social problems of the Malaysian society.

Drugs, gangs, money snatching and revenge taking are the causes of crimes, while the lack of education, economic marginalisation and cultural backwardness are the nutrients for crimes.

The skin colour of a racial group should not be linked to crimes. However, the education, economy and culture of a racial group are having direct relations to their crime rates. Only by addressing the problem from here, we might be able to curb the sources of crimes.