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Crime statistics don't pay

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators slammed interior ministry officials on Wednesday in a hearing on crime for failing to assure the public that the country is safer since Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) pledged to crack down on crime in March.

KMT Legislator Tsai Chin-lung (蔡錦隆) presided over the first of five public hearings in the legislature on what Tsai and other KMT legislators said were high crime rates. Wednesday's hearing focused on the issue of phone scam organizations, which KMT Legislator Hsu Shao-ping (徐少萍) said had proliferated in the absence of effective measures to hinder their activities.

"A show of hands, please. Who here has received a text message or call from a phone scam group at some point?" Hsu asked attendees; a majority raised their hands.

"Public safety is deteriorating steadily," Tsai said, adding that Taiwan was on the verge of becoming the "Republic of Scams" (詐騙共和國).

Deputy Minister of the Interior Lin Chung-sen (林中森) and National Police Agency General-Secretary Tsai Chun-chang (蔡俊章) said that the ministry had improved public safety considerably in the past year. Lin said that the establishment of a hotline and a high-tech criminal investigation center devoted to investigating phone scam cases had resulted in a 12 percent reduction in such cases over the past six months.

The Ministry of the Interior released a press statement on Wednesday that said the nation's overall crime rate was down more than 10 percent from March to August, compared with the crime rate during the same period last year.

The number of solved cases had increased more than 3 percent, according to the statement.

"In the past six months, no major criminal cases comparable to those involving Chang Hsi-ming (張錫明) and Lin Ming-hwa (林明華) have occurred," Minister of the Interior Lee Yi-yang (李逸洋) told reporters at a press conference on Monday, referring to the notorious kidnappers who were apprehended last year.

But this did not convince the critics.

"Statistics are no use. Numbers don't comfort people!" said Tsai, raising his voice and waving his finger at the ministry and police officials in attendance.

Tsai and fellow KMT Legislator Lin Tsang-min (林滄敏) said that recent opinion polls indicate the public is not satisfied with public safety, regardless of any positive statistics. They called on the ministries of the interior and justice to work harder to gain public confidence.

"We need more religion in society. Look at members of organizations like the Tzu Chi Foundation," Lin added, referring to the prominent Buddhist non-profit organization. "Do those people commit crimes? No, they don't."

Assistant Professor Chu Pei-lei (朱蓓蕾) of Central Police University said that a lack of cross-strait law enforcement made cracking down on organized crime rings difficult.

"Many of these rings that prey on Taiwanese are based in China, and given the lack of cross-strait communication channels, it's very hard to go after them," Chu said, adding that cross-strait crime should be addressed by national security policy and not categorized as a domestic crime issue.

"Phone scam operations are a political problem, too," she said, referring to their international character.

Hsu Mu-yuan (許木元), legislative liaison for the Ministry of the Interior, objected to the KMT legislators' rejection of the statistics.

"Administrative bodies deal in the language of statistics and facts, while polls are meant to gauge public sentiment," Hsu said, adding that statistics and polls were often incompatible.

"Although not 100 percent accurate, statistics are very significant in that they are useful references," Chu told the Taipei Times.

She also disagreed with the statement that statistics were "completely insignificant."
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