Chau Wai Kuong calls for more staff and regulatory support

The Judiciary Police (PJ) has said that more investigators are needed to increase the efficiency of investigations. “Macau receives about 30 million visitors per year. We do not have enough staff to handle all these people,” the PJ director, Chau Wai Kuong, said during the press conference held yesterday.
Currently, the PJ has a total of 635 investigators, with another 82 currently in training and 45 interns. The director said he aims to increase the number of investigators to 900, which he considers an “ideal” number to “address the current challenges.”
The need for more officers is not a new topic, with the PJ having been trying to recruit more staff since at least 2013.
Chau said that, in 2015, there were 45 positions open and he expects to open a new recruitment call for another 60 vacant positions for 2016.
Speaking about the needs and challenges of the police force, the director said that he has already proposed revisions in the law regarding IT and high-tech crimes. His proposal aims to continue to fight this kind of crime, for which the “modus operandi” changes frequently and very quickly and “can manifest in many different forms.”
One of the police’s biggest concerns is the advertising of eight illegal “online casinos” that are operating in areas near the border. They are very difficult to locate because they sometimes start from disguised broadcast stations that are often not even situated in fixed locations, but in mobile stations carried in backpacks.
This legal amendment, also addressed by the Secretary for Security, Wong Sio Chak, in an interview published on Monday by the Times, aims to “help the PJ keep up with the fast pace of the criminals using these technologies,” Chau said.
Another possible legal revision being debated was the one relating to “sex crimes.” Although the PJ director did not want to state his position regarding the need to revise this law, he said that “the fact that this is, by nature, a private crime makes the collection of evidence difficult. It has to start from a formal complaint from the victim.” He concluded that
a change in the legislation would hypothetically transform it into a semi-public crime, which “would certainly help the authorities to fight it.” However, he said the right “belongs to the community to voice their will regarding this matter. If the community decides that it should be considered in this way [as a semi-public crime] and the law is changed accordingly, we can and will act by the law.” RM