Quality policemen is the way to fight crime

Former Inspector-General of Police Hanif Omar gives some tips to the government and the current police force on how to fight crime.

PETALING JAYA: Good people, good training and strict supervision are the three most important factors in the fight against crime.

Former Inspector-General of Police Hanif Omar feels while the police force needs adequate manpower and equipment, the most important factor is quality manpower.

Hanif, the longest serving IGP of 20 years, was commenting on efforts by the government to address the worrying crime rate as evident in an increased allocation of RM591million under the 2013 Budget.

Among other things, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak had announced that the government is increasing police personnel and equipment, patrol bikes and CCTV cameras as well as spending more to reimburse auxiliary forces such as civilian volunteers.

In an SMS communiqué with FMT, 73-year-old Hanif lauded the increased allocations for the force as “most welcome”, and talked about ways to increase the efficiency of the force.

First, Hanif suggested that there must be KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) worked out for every personnel. “Each man must show some results from his month’s work,” he said.

“I used to check every patrol car for its year’s productive work, including cost of petrol, oil, lubricants, tires and servicing… and compare it with the cost of two patrolmen’s annual salary.

“I caught several cars with nil return of productive work… no arrests, no verifiable chases, no summonses. Some were misused by commanding officers or lesser officers.”

He said that ‘beatmen’ must be trained to see tip-offs from their casual contacts and from curious observations.

“They must not walk a beat aimlessly but must get to know what activities are carried out along their beats. They should be rewarded by timely promotions for consistently being productive and showing initiative. Do not promote those who produce no results.”

Hanif also said that enough money should be channeled into the training, re-training or advance training of all officers involved in the criminal justice system.

“Also the upgrading of the supervisory skills and capability of the echelons of supervising officers at all levels, with clear KPIs should be carried out.

“The lines between the supervisors and the supervised must be redrawn clearly again.The blurring of the line as I suspect to exist today should promptly be stopped.”

Effective patrols

He said that modern equipment should be supplied to achieve a better monitoring of effective patrols.

“Ideally the men, cars and motocycles should be GPS tagged both for supervision as well as for safety. More CCTVs should be installed in crime prone areas and should cover beats and patrol stopping and meeting points, so that control centre can monitor the beatmen and patrol cars,” he said.

He noted that there have been instances where deployed men bunch up together in groups, adding that in recent times, he has seen five motorcycle patrolmen congregating in one spot, including in children’ s playgrounds.

“This speaks of ineffective and unproductive deployment or supervision. [When we have groups of] 4 or 5, it means that 4 or 5 men cover only one place instead of 3 or 5 areas.”

“When men are grouped together like that they have a tendency to chit-chat instead of observing the goings-on for breaches of the law,” he said, citing the Inspector General’s Standing Order which dictates that no two police beatmen should be closer to each other than 100 paces away.

“[They should be] close enough to assist each other but too far from each other to chat.”

Hanif said that PDRM must not forget that the General Operations Force and the Federal Reserve (riot) Units (FRU) are the IGP’s reserve forces that can be sent anywhere to assist local forces.

“They are often used for this purpose today but they should be restructured, given multi-skills training, and additional equipment to improve their versatility and skills, and to enable them to work in pairs or singly. That way they can cover more area,” he said.

He said that all men should be adequately equipped with “a hand gun, a walkie-talkie, an “American” baton, a capsicum spray, hand-cuffs and be trained in unarmed combat at least once a week as was done before so that they are confident about their level of fitness and are confident they can take on bigger opponents”.

“When the crime prevention personnel – the beat and patrolmen and the special rounds men are not productive, more criminals would be able to commit crimes.

“When that happens the workload of CID — the IOs and AIOs increases. When the detectives are able to assist the IOs and AIOs to investigate successfully, and here they must be ably assisted by police, chemistry department or Ministry of Health forensic scientists, then the police prosecutors and DPPs will have an increased workload.

“If the IOs and the AIOs are overloaded, they cannot devote sufficient time to investigate properly and speedily, resulting in cold trails, slipshod investigations – poor evidence gathering, broken chains of evidence, doubtful integrity of exhibits, poor documentation, and so on. Then a lot of cases will not be prosecuted or will get thrown out of court.”

Misunderstanding of policing

Fighting crime, he said, requires the combined effectiveness of crime prevention, crime detection, crime investigation and crime prosecution.

“They are inter-dependent functions involving the Management and CID branches, and the AG Chambers. The effectiveness of all these units must be properly balanced as they are interconnected,” he said.

He said that fighting crime calls for crime prevention which is largely the work of the Management/Administrative Branch, where all beat and patrolmen come under. Crime detection, on the other hand, comes under the CID in the form of detectives or the special round personnel (under Management Branch).

“Who in the police force are doing crime fighting? Judging by statements by some politicians and members of the public that the annual police budget allocates too much money to Management/ Administration and too little to CID, it shows a misunderstanding of policing.”

He said that the additional budget would boost the Management’s crime prevention effectiveness with 10,000 additional police volunteer reserve personnel and 1,000 patrol motorcycles.

Hanif also said that a sufficient number of the 1,000 motorcycles should be used by beat and patrol supervisers, and even AIOs and IOs, to enhance the men’s compliance with the SOPs.

Recounting his younger days as an investigation officer in Malacca, Hanif said: “I used my own scoooter when I was an IO, carrying my fingerprint-lifting tools, my own camera and my comparative ruler, statement forms and police 55A report forms.

“That way I could proceed to a crime scene without waiting for the inadequate police car to take me to the place, that way victims of crime were attended to quickly creating a better level of satisfaction.”

Asked what he thought was the most important aspect the PDRM should focus on right now, Hanif said:

“I would say more AIOs (assistant investigation officers), Ios (investigation officers) and CID (criminal investigation department) team supervisors or SIOs (senior investigation officers) who have undergone intensive CID multi- skills and team training.”

He said that preferably, each IO should handle no more than eight new IPs a month, though he noted that the IO would also be loaded with many older IPs that have not found closure and needed to be followed up on. He said that each AIO should not have more than 20 simple IPs a month

Hanif also suggested forming CID teams consisting “one SIO, two IOs, two AIOs, two general forensic detectives (fingerprint and plastercast-lifting) and four ordinary detectives”.

“Investigations should be team-play and not exclusive. Every team member should be able to handle any enquiry by victims of the crimes they are investigating,” he said, adding that each team must be quipped with all the modern tools to assist in investigations.

He said that “special crimes” like complicated commercial or cyber crimes, or high profile crimes should be handled by special skills teams.

Hanif noted that two things are dragging down the police image:

“First, the perception of increased crime and relative lack of security… it doesn’t matter that the world rates us as being among the safest countries in the world: public perception is more important.

“Second, the relative low number of successful prosecutions compared to number of index crimes or so-called solved crimes.”