Priority for those reporting sexual crimes at neighbourhood centres
Survivors of sexual crimes will be given priority and greater privacy when reporting crimes at neighbourhood police centres from April 2023.
They will be able to indicate at the queue management kiosks in neighbourhood police centres that they are reporting a sexual crime, and will be given a private space.
Outlining the details of the initiative at the Sexual Crime Awareness Seminar held at the Police Cantonment Complex on Friday, Minister for Law and Home Affairs K. Shanmugam said that the police will progressively roll out the “Sexual Crime Report” option in the queue management kiosks, which will immediately alert the officers at the centre.
“This year, we will increase our efforts to support victims of sexual crimes and that hopefully will lower the barriers to report sexual crimes,” he said.
This was among the new initiatives and enhancements to existing efforts announced by the police on Friday.
Earlier on April 3, the police formed the Sexual Crime and Family Violence Command (SFC) under the Criminal Investigation Department, which has officers who are specifically trained to deal with sexual crime and family violence cases.
Head Operations and Policy Branch of the command, Deputy Superintendent of Police Sabrina Wong said the Command was formed to enhance investigations and the management of such cases at a systemic level, including victim care.
“This also allows for greater synergy in stakeholder management and policymaking, as well as better coordination of upstream measures to tackle such crimes,” she said.
She was speaking to the media in the refurbished One-Stop Abuse Forensic Examination Centre (OneSAFE Centre) at the Police Cantonment Complex which will open later in April.
The centre allows sexual crime victims to undergo forensic and medical examinations in a private facility, instead of being taken to a public hospital. Its upgrade includes two new medical rooms to increase its capacity for forensic medical examination.
The initiatives come after 9,629 reports of sexual assault, including rape, sexual assault by penetration, outrage of modesty, and sexual crime involving children and vulnerable victims were reported between 2019 and 2022.
Molest cases returned to pre-pandemic levels last year according to annual police statistics released earlier this year with 1,610 outrage of modesty cases reported in 2022, up from 1,474 cases in 2021, 1,320 in 2020. A total of 1,605 were recorded in 2019.
Mr Shanmugam said on Friday that there will always be room for improvement in the way the police manage sexual crime cases.
He said: “We will never get this completely right, because any organisation that has a large number of people dealing with a large number of different types of cases, with human agency, even with the best will in the world, there will be errors, if not something else.
“And we will just have to continuously learn, internalise and improve.”
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