Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Make the Police responsible to enforce the law

10 August 2013

Editor, Forum Page
Straits Times.

I refer to the letter by Adrian Lee Chiew Chaun entitled "Red tape discourages civic consciousness" (ST 10 August 2013).

Mr. Lee reported a case of an overfilled truck spilling sand on the road. His complaint was passed from one agency to another and all of them appeared to be unwilling to act on the offence.

Several years ago, the enforcement of the law was the duty of the Police, who were specially trained to handle violations. I suggest that the duty should be passed back to the Police to remove the current ambiguity.

I have heard anecdotes of how complaints are now being handled by investigators and suspect that there is too much reliance on paperwork. The effectiveness can be improved significantly by changing the focus to more field work and communication. It is likely that the person in charge is not aware of the violation of the violation. A request from the Police for a discussion is likely to result in corrective action being taken by the offender or the employer of the offender. The Police only need to pursue more intensive investigation on repeat offenders.

Let us go back to our old common sense approach to correct some of the problems that have been outstanding for a long time.

Tan Kin Lian

1 comment:

David Soh Poh Huat said...

I totally agree with you on your point. Our policing system should be strictly handled by the police and not outsourced eg to LTA, Cisco etc. Within the law enforcement system, they should look into their processes and to ensure that every report is handled in the most effective and efficient way. Lets take an example, recent road fatal accident, the driver identified immediately but as we are aware the KPE 2 cars speeding, no conviction or drivers being made public were done. Could it be the cameras at KPE belong to LTA, too many red tapes. This is a real example of how efficient the system is.

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