Amid public discontent with a rising crime rate, the National Police Agency (NPA) yesterday urged people to report crime and promised to improve crime-fighting to restore public confidence.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported on a study yesterday conducted by National Chung Cheng University, which found that an estimated NT$155 billion (US$4.6 billion) was lost through fraud-related crimes nationwide last year and NT$116 billion from theft.
As many as 70 percent of respondents felt there had been too much crime in the past year, the survey said.
About the same number of respondents were dissatisfied with the government’s performance in fighting crime, while almost 60 percent were worried that they or a family member would become a victim of crime.
As many as 590,000 families have fallen victim to fraud, with each family averaging NT$260,000 in losses, the study found.
In response to the study, the police agency said its statistics showed that only NT$12.3 billion had been lost through fraud, a fraction of the amount quoted in the university’s study.
National Police Agency Deputy Director-General I Yung-jen (伊永仁) told a press conference that the agency’s survey showed 70 percent of respondents believed the crime rate was low where they lived, but only 31 percent believed it was low nationwide.
“Public sentiment is probably affected by [reports of] individual cases,” he said.
As for the large gap between the amount of financial losses estimated by the university’s study and the amount reported to the NPA, he said fraud victims should be brave and report their case to the police to help them fight crime better.
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