I welcome and appreciate Dr Lim Teck Ghee’s thoughtful comments on the Polis Diraja Malaysia’s response to his earlier critique on the PDRM and crime .

It appears that the police tend to be quite defensive and the public are also getting more frustrated and increasingly fearful of the security situation in our country.

Hence what we now need therefore is to find solutions to this serious crime environment. Thus we need to go back to the issue that you have raised – that the police must redouble efforts to fight crime.

But the question we all need to also ask is whether just “redoubling efforts” is good enough?

There are bigger issues!

I would propose that there has to be an overall assessment of the crime problems and a more determined approach should be taken to provide answers to our questions as to how to fight crime much more effectively.

This means thinking out of the box on the macro issues that create the environment for crime, such as:

1. Reviewing immigration policy on foreign workers,

2. Quality improvement of the PDRM,

3. Better ethnic composition of the PDRM,

4. Having multilingual police officers handling complaints,

5. Monitoring the performance of police officers,

6. Fighting corruption in the PDRM itself,

7. Providing rewards to informants from the public to gather better intelligence,

8. Commissioning an independent committee of professionals, including academics, to review the whole process of the reporting of complaints on crime.

My list above is only indicative and you can add many more items for consideration.