PEMANDU: Only 0.75pc GTP funds spent on police publicity
KUALA LUMPUR, July 12 — Putrajaya only spent under one per cent of its Government Transformation Programme (GTP) allocation for public relations exercises on crime, PEMANDU said today, refuting the 71 per cent figure alleged by PKR.
The government efficiency unit said PKR president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Ismail had mistakenly considered the cost for deploying police personnel on the ground as costing for a public relations exercise when the actual cost was one used to “run the initiative of redeploying police officers”.
File photo of police on duty at the April 28 Bersih rally in Kuala Lumpur. PEMANDU has come out to clarify spending on public relations exercises to combat crime. “Only 0.75pc of the GTP fund has been allocated for public awareness and media exercises, which is used to inform and update the rakyat on initiatives and programmes which have been identified and implemented to combat crime and to make Malaysian streets safer and more secure,” PEMANDU said in a statement handed out to reporters at this morning’s media briefing on crime.
“Wan Azizah could have verified her facts before passing false statements to the media, which are meant to mislead the Malaysian public on the actual work and progress being made under the ‘Reducing Crime NKRA (national key results areas)’,” it added.
Dr Wan Azizah alleged on Tuesday that the federal government had spent a whopping 71 per cent of funds for its GTP on public relations exercises this year instead of using it to fight crime.
The PKR president highlighted the Najib administration’s decision to spend a large slice of its 2012 Budget to boost public perception towards the police instead of helping Malaysians feel safer on the streets.
“Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s Government Transformation Programme based on the 2012 Budget showed a greater focus on how to manage public perception than overcoming the problem of crime,” she told a news conference here.
Eugene Teh, the PEMANDU Reducing Crime NKRA director, briefs reporters on the government’s efforts to combat crime at its office in KL Sentral on July 12, 2012. — Picture by Saw Siow Feng“The government is not sincere when it only gives more focus towards public perception of the police and not overcoming crime itself,” said the former federal lawmaker.
Dr Wan Azizah said a long-term plan to cut crime can only happen if there is strong economic governance to help narrow the disparity in income.
The wife of Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim has openly declared her plan to run for election at the state level in the polls due next April and appears to be campaigning on combating a seeming nationwide spike in crime, disputing the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) federal coalition’s claims of cutting the crime rate.
Last week, she had demanded the government redirect the police Special Branch (SB) towards fighting crime instead of spying on the public, citing parliamentary papers which showed that in 2010 the unit had used its manpower to produce reports on the activities of more than 700,000 Malaysians.
PEMANDU and the Home Ministry have claimed that crime dropped by 11 per cent last year and street crime by 40 per cent since the GTP was put in place two years ago, despite a recent spate of high-profile kidnappings, assaults and robberies.
The latest high-profiled robbery involved a loss of RM1.17 million stolen from ATMs at a Carrefour hypermarket in Wangsa Maju, a densely-populated suburb of Kuala Lumpur.
