Motor Vehicle Theft in Malaysia

Motor vehicle thefts are one of the major crime activities in Malaysia. Motor vehicle theft crime is high and rising. In 1980, motor vehicle theft comprised only 22% of the total crime cases. But this has increased to 49% in 2004. The cases of motor vehicle theft have shown generally a large increase since the last two decades. That experts estimated that by the year 2009, it will further increase to 74%..

From the given graph, we can see that from the year 1980 to the year 1995, the cases of motor vehicle theft have shown an almost linear progress with less than 20000 (twenty thousand) cases a year with some minor increases in the year 1986 and 1987. After 1995 up to the year 2005, the number of cases seems too multiplied with an exponential rate, where it increases from 20000 (two thousand) cases in 1995 to approximately 60000 (sixty thousand) cases in the year 2000. It then further increase to approximately 160000 (one hundred and sixty thousand) cases a year. After 2005 the number of cases decrease to around 100000 (one hundred thousand) cases in the year 2010. Motorcycle thefts represent a huge percentage of the type of total motor vehicles stolen. In 2004, for example, motorcycles comprised approximately 120000 (one hundred and twenty thousand) or 75% of the total motor vehicle theft cases, whereas private cars were less than 20000 (twenty thousand) or less than 12%.

These increases of cases of vehicle theft show that there are also large increases in the risk in owning motorised vehicle. Vehicle owners have to take extra precautionary action in handling their vehicle. In most of these cases, the thefts were result of the negligence nature of the owner. Some of the vehicle owner fail to ensure that the vehicle are properly locked just because it is in a supposed safe place like paid parking area, office parking spot, and others. There were also cases where owners left their vehicle running just because they went away only for a short period of time and...