Once again, KL is listed as one of the most dangerous cities in the region. (If the list on 10awesome.com website in 2013 is to be believed, we’re also the sixth most dangerous city in the world.) Travel and world geography website Worldatlas.com – who claims to be a highly trusted web resource for travellers, students, educators, governments and anyone interested in exploring the world – ranked Kuala Lumpur as No. 2 on their list of ‘Most Dangerous Cities In Asia’, followed by PJ at No. 3, Klang at No. 5 and Johor Bahru at No. 10. The result is based on a user-contributed website Numbeo.com, which created a set of crime indices to compare global cities based on relative levels of crime, safety, law and order. It’s important to note that the nature of the survey is mostly perception-based, posing questions such as ‘How worried are you of being mugged or robbed?’, ‘How much is the problem violent crimes?’ (this is not a typo), etc.
All four are said to be infested with risks of falling prey to snatch thieves, scammers, pickpockets, rape, robbery and murder. For instance, the website claims that the Larkin Bus Terminal in JB is ‘infamous for occasional pickpockets’; ‘violent clashes among [Chinese and Indian] gangs being quite frequent’ in Klang; ‘the dense population of PJ… as well as the thriving business community are probably all partly responsible for attracting criminals’; and last but not least, ‘pickpockets and scam artists flood the streets of Kuala Lumpur daily’ and ‘serious crimes involving physical violence, murder, rapes and robberies are commonly reported’.
The Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar was quoted as saying in The Sun Daily that crimes in Malaysia were no different to that in other Asian countries. ‘To compare us and list four places here as being highly dangerous is inaccurate. We disagree and rebut this claim. Those who have come here as tourists and seen for themselves will know how freely and safely they can walk the streets in the country without incident. There have been isolated cases of a few of the thousands of tourists here falling victims to crime but that does not make the named places the most dangerous in Asia. This is an unfair and lopsided claim.’
Worldatlas.com has also been scorned by Malaysian netizens for its bias reporting and lack of credibility. Here are some comments and vague replies that stood out:
Worldatlas.com placed Karachi, Pakistan as the top crime-prone city. Other cities named were Quezon City and Manila in the Philippines, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Ulan Bataar (Mongolia) and Gurgaon in Haryana state, India.
What do you think about this list?