The Royal Malaysian Police is exchanging data with local authorities for the first time to identify and better police crime-prone areas across the country, Nawawi Bin Junoh (pictured), Deputy Superintendent of Police, Inspector General Police’s Secretariat (Research & Development) told FutureGov.

“The Ministry of Urban Wellbeing, Housing and Local Government is sharing land use data with us,” the Deputy Superintendent said. With this, the police can find “where are the crime-prone areas, what are they doing down there and what do we have on the land there, like old or abandoned buildings”.

The police’s work has already allowed it to understand the landuse of areas crime prone areas, leading to a reallocation of resources and a 45% reduction in index crime, such as murder, assault and property theft.

These initiatives are part of the police’s Safe City Programme, which Junoh has led for the last four years. The police’s Safe City Monitoring System (SCMS) shows the status of crime in Malaysia across 13 categories and helps indicate how the safe city project is progressing, he said. The system currently covers 413 police stations across all Malaysian cities.

The system has been integrated with the Police Reporting System (PRS), which the police have been using since 2004. PRS manages information on police complaints and crime victims, and supplies the Safe City Monitoring System with raw crime data.

The SCMS then processes this data and uses geolocation software to pinpoint the crime status on a map, Junoh explained. “It restructures the raw data so that it can be easily understood and analysed by police personnel,” he added.

Junoh is now in the process of expanding SCMS to other departments within the police, such as narcotics and traffic. Once it is integrated with their systems, the SCMS can analyse more data and help the police be more efficient in their job. “Once everything is in place, the SCMS will cut down time taken [by police] and can show you exactly where police [resources] need to be enhanced to improve crime prevention,” he said.

To ensure all these systems deliver on their promise, and the underlying IT infrastructure runs reliably, his team needs to work with the IT department to make sure that the technology is taken care of. “Currently we have a very slow network and so cannot fulfil the needs of the SCMS. We have to work hand-in-hand with the IT department to make sure that this project is reliable to the organisation,” he said.

Junoh ensures that employees from the IT department are embedded in the project team, along with staff from other departments involved in the project.

The organisation must also train employees to take over and run IT projects once the technology has been handed over by contractors. “Human capital” is an important part of ensuring reliability of IT infrastructure, he said. “Vendors have a short period with us. After the contract expires, they have to transfer the technology to us. So we must have a group of people who are able to continue handling the project.”