One would have thought that high crime rate (“the cause”) is reason for public demonisation of police (“the effect”) and not the other way around as what Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein says, ie that public demonisation of police is cause of high crime rate. Is he getting his cause and effect mixed up, which shows abdication of responsibility to motivate the police to rectify their shortcoming and perform?

Hishammuddin defends the police. Rightly or wrongly his defence probably proceeds on this basis:

First, he implies that the high crime rate may be attributable to other factors such as the worsening economic situation, rural urban drift, influx of foreigners, income disparity which overwhelm and render insignificant police shortcomings (eg. inadequate manpower, corruption, poor work ethics and attitude of its rank and file), even if acknowledged, as a cause, direct or indirect, of the high crime rate.

Once Hishammuddin separates the factor of inefficiency/laches of the police force from being a root cause or the major contributory cause of our burgeoning crime incidences – that he argues is caused more by other socio-economic factors rather than police work – he proceeds next to contend that demonisation of police will cause demoralization of the police thereby causing their rank and file to have less commitment to carry out their public duty of crime prevention, detection and apprehension. So, in this sense, demonisation of police has become a cause (not an effect) of their slacking or dereliction of duty that contributes to high crime rate….

The problem of such an argument on Hishammuddin’s part is that it does not escape implicitly conceding that police inefficiency/dereliction of duty does have a bearing on the crime rate….

[So if that’s the case, it may now be asked back, why should not police dereliction of duty/inefficiency be blamed as the first cause of high crime rate thereby justifying public demonisation rather than twisting it the other way around to say, as he did, that public demonisation is the cause of high crime rate?]

That’s where he will say further that whether something is a cause or effect is relative – and that the very alleged cause (police inefficiency) of an effect (high crime rate) is the effect of a preceding cause (ie public demonisation causing demoralization and inefficiency of the police force).

Which is why this kind of argument can proceed to ad infinitum and is basically useless and fruitless for Opposition to rationalize or engage in unproductive rebuttals of what he said that lead to nowhere conclusive.