Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said this at an event in Taiping about a week ago.
The police needs full support and trust from the public while the Home Ministry (KDN) and its minister (whoever he is) are tasked with monitoring and regulating important agencies such as PDRM, the Immigration Dept, AADK, Rela and others.
![]()
Zahid stressed more on the role of the police force in maintaining law and order in the country. The challenges get stiffer while the critics get thicker.
Without public's cooperation and trust, the police personnel would find it difficult to execute their duty.
![]()
The police needs full support and trust from the public while the Home Ministry (KDN) and its minister (whoever he is) are tasked with monitoring and regulating important agencies such as PDRM, the Immigration Dept, AADK, Rela and others.
Without public's cooperation and trust, the police personnel would find it difficult to execute their duty.
Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar said PDRM aims to have continuous relationship and cooperation with the public in lines with the theme for this year’s Police Day, “Polis dan Masyarakat Berpisah Tiada.'
PDRM believes that the job of safeguarding the country’s peace and harmony is not the job of the police alone but that of the society.
Moreover, Malaysia’s 30 million population has exceeded the 250:1 people to police officer ratio, as currently there are only 126,800 police personnel in the country.“We need to recruit 7,000 new officers to meet the ratio but until then, we will carry out our duties the best we can,” Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said in a special interview in conjunction with Police Day.PDRM has been engaging the community on a daily basis through various programmes such as talks and seminars where they educate the public on their rights and what they can do to battle crime.He added that public awareness is important to reduce crime rate by 5 per cent on a yearly basis up to the year 2020.Khalid also identified logistics as a shortcoming and an internal challenge, where equipment and vehicles need to be replaced and has to be done in stages.“We even have a shortage of houses for our officers where some of them are currently renting outside.“In cases where police officers have died, their spouses need to move out and telling them so is not easy but we must give priority to our officers in service,” Khalid said.
Among PDRM’s external challenges include border controls the vast mountain range, ribers and jungles are used to smuggle contrabands into and out of the country.
The police have also been dealing with a lot of cyber crimes of late including sedition, piracy and theft of intellectual property.
“We take fast actions on cyber threats as we believe that prevention is better than cure. We take them very seriously and our drastic actions towards some individuals recently have proven that,” Khalid said, adding that in the first nine months of 2014, 8,140 cyber crimes were reported.
As for militant, extremism and radicalism activities, the police is continuously monitoring and identifying individuals who influence and recruit Malaysians into militant groups.
Besides detaining them, the suspects are also going through counseling to change their brainwashed mindsets.
“To meet the challenges of more complex crimes, we do what we can to equip our officers with better assets and improve our systems like the Central Intelligence Unit (CIU) system and Self-Monitoring Analytics Reporting Technology (SMART). We try to keep up with the international standard in order to not get left behind,” Khalid said.