PKR: Putrajaya spent 71pc GTP funds on police publicity, not fighting crime
UPDATED @ 12:59:30 PM 12-07-2012
Dr Wan Azizah said the GTP showed a greater focus on how to manage public perception than overcoming the problem of crime. — File picPETALING JAYA, July 10 — The federal government spent a whopping 71 per cent of funds for its Government Transformation Programme (GTP) on public relations exercises this year instead of using it to fight crime, Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail said today.
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.
“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 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, the government’s efficiency unit, 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.
