NEW YORK: Home Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin has conveyed the Royal Malaysia Police’s (PDRM) interest in forging cooperation with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in certain aspects, such as information exchange and training.
This was done during the minister’s visit to the NYPD here on Thursday.
“We discussed having a memorandum of cooperation between the NYPD and our police headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.
“It will do us good if we can exchange information, or collaborate with them in training, capacity building and etc,” the minister told Bernama.
Muhyiddin is in New York as part of his working visit to the United States, which is aimed at strengthening the security cooperation between the two countries. The visit kicked off last Sunday in Washington DC.
NYPD is the largest and one of the oldest municipal police departments in the United States with about 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees.
It was established in 1845, and today is responsible for policing an 8.5 million person city by performing a wide variety of public safety, law enforcement, traffic management, counter-terror, and emergency response roles.
“As the police department in charge of the metropolitan city area, it seems that the NYPD has large manpower ... and uses the latest systems and technology.
“I’m sure we can really learn a thing or two from their experience,” Muhyiddin said.
The minister and his entourage also paid a visit to the El Dorado Financial Crimes Task Force which is entrusted with the responsibility to tackle, among others, the issue of money laundering.
“We were also given quite a detailed briefing on how they are tackling the (money laundering) issue, other related issues, their performance and the challenges that they had faced.”
He said Malaysia is prepared to cooperate with the task force.
Muhyiddin also commented on his meeting with the US ambassador for trafficking in persons, John Cotton Richmond on Wednesday, the final day of his four-day visit to Washington DC before proceeding to New York.
The minister said he sought Richmond’s view on how Malaysia should go about taking effective measures to deal with issues concerning trafficking in persons.
He said this was important so that Malaysia’s performance in handling the matter could be further improved. - Bernama
