Unemployment And Crime

On Feb 20th, it was reported that the government is targeting to reduce street crimes by 20% by year-end. It’s good that they recognize the crime rate is getting higher and the streets in Malaysia are not as safe. I would not bother much with this piece of news until I became the latest victim of snatch theft.

It happened on last Thursday, Feb 25th at Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam. I got into my car after a quick grab of a pie from Secret Recipe. Before I started the engine, a man opened my passenger seat and grab my handbag from the foot of the seat. Another man was waiting right behind my car in a motorbike ready to speed off or to attack if things did not go as planned. Looking back, I breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn’t injured physically though it’s a great hassle to replace all my documents, phone and other belongings.

That sets me to do a bit of reading on recent spate of street crimes and sad to say, some of them had tragic endings. Why is it on the rise? Is it due to unemployment?

As we all would admit, unemployment is always an important reason why people resort to crime. For those who are unemployed and in desperate need of cash, they would resort to do anything. The correlation between these two is indisputable but sadly, the trend shows worrying increase.

But then, Malaysia unemployment is not as bad as compared to other countries. Beginning of last year, people had been predicting that Malaysia’s unemployment rate would rise to 4.5% but it did not happened. In fact, it has been quite stable throughout, resting at 3.6% as of 3rd quarter of last year.

But let’s not forget that unemployment of other countries play an important factor too. Comparatively, Malaysia seems to be doing better and that causes an influx of foreign workers, and the bad news is that not all enter the county legally. In 2008, it was reported that the crime caused by illegal immigrants was about 20%. Now, that’s something that we should really be concerned with.

Having said that, the scenario can be much worse if our unemployment rate is higher than predicted. Let’s continue to hope the employment outlook ahead will be better and not worse. We do not want to see too many desperate men on the streets, do we?