Officer Myint Thaw spoke at an October 28th press conference held at the Aung Myint-Thar Administration Office.
More than 160 criminals are still at large in Ye Township. When questioned as to why the criminals had not been caught yet, the township administration official replied that the police station does not have a large enough force to deal with such high numbers, and has not received enough information from the public.
“From the force that we have, we assign one police [officer] per quarter. We won’t be able to go door-to-door, so we depend on the public [‘s information]. Some [of the criminals] have died while we [have been engaged] in the search, some left to Thailand for work and never came back. Some left to other towns and moved around, [while] some [have] become members of an organization and use their names as the organization. There are a lot of such [instances],” said the township official.
Some members of the public who attended the press conference note that the public does not report crimes to the police because of its general lack of confidence in township police due to the police staff’s lack of responsibility and lack of respect of the police code of conduct.
“Lately, in our quarter, some guys [were] drunk [and] came with [big] knives to cut and damage six local shops. We informed the police, and the police arrested them. They were detained at the police station for one night, then released, and those guys were seen the next morning,” said a young man from Aung Myint-thar quarter.
At the press conference, Officer Myint Thaw requested that the public inform him directly of any crime, rather than providing information to the lower-ranked police officers.
The head of police and other attendees have analyzed that the majority of criminals having committed crimes such as physical assault, murder, the selling of drugs, and theft, were not local people, but migrant workers, and stated that those individuals often hide their ID cards, making it difficult to catch them.
Press conference attendees advised that, in order to decrease the crime rate and successfully arrest suspects, the police should obtain background documents from those who migrate to Ye Township areas and those who work in orchards and plantations, while those coming from far-away to stay in the township should have their ID cards checked.
With the objective of arresting the more than 10,000 criminals on the run, Ye Township police have arrested 618 individuals from April to September 2014. According to the Myanmar Police Force Department, the police have arrested 13,404 culprits from 1986 to June 2014.
