How Safe Are We Really?

Safety and security are foundational issues facing Malaysia. Is Pakatan Rakyat or Barisan Nasional better equipped to handle these issues?
Barisan Nasional's approach to improving safety and security is to stop threats before they become attacks. Pakatan Rakyat's is to investigate those attacks after they are complete.
Clearly, BN has immersed itself in modern theories of policing – increasing police presence and mobility, and making concealment more difficult to prevent crime.
BN has committed to an additional 20,000 police, an extra 5,000 police motorcycles, and increased staffing of the Armed Forces. This allows a visible presence to deter threats and allow rapid response to those acts that occur.
Although increased police presence is vital to maintaining and enhancing safety, that task is much easier with a better-ordered and maintained environment. BN offers a comprehensive plan for housing reform that includes promises to revive abandoned housing projects, take over the maintenance and upkeep of public housing projects, replace squatter settlements, and rehabilitate low cost houses and flats in urban areas.
Where people have safe housing and ample police presence, crime universally recedes.
Additionally, BN promises enhanced use of CCTV, lighting and other efforts that prevent crime. These simple measures are now considered good governance the world over, and BN is making them its own.
BN has adopted the idea that it is better to prevent crime than to merely work to prosecute criminals. By contrast, Pakatan Rakyat appears resigned to the fact of crime and intends to see criminals caught after committing their crimes.
In a typically sparse half page on crime issues, Pakatan's manifesto first attacks BN for "the immense failure of the policing system we have today", before promising to drive the police away from preventing crimes and into investigating them once the crime is complete.
Thus, the force will be "rationalised" (read: job cuts) and directed to investigative work, with RM1 billion spent on forensics. There will be an "allocation of RM50 million a year to build police posts in places of high public concentration", so that police will have central places to gather before investigating crimes, rather than dispersing in the community to deter criminals before the crimes take place.
Police will no longer focus on the intensive work of preventing crime by their presence and analytical work, instead, once the crime has been committed, more police will be there to determine what happened.
In the wake of Lahad Datu, Pakatan is silent on enhancing the role and capabilities of the Armed Forces. However, the Opposition pact appears to plan a decrease in the size of the Armed Forces, as the only mention it merits in the Pakatan manifesto is two sentences promising an extra RM500 million to a fund for ex-servicemen and women.
The choice is between BN's plan to prevent crime and security threats to improve the rakyat's well-being, and Pakatan's plan to investigate attacks after they end and the damage is done.
Put that way, the choice should be clear.