G

reater Jakarta is being called the fifth most violent place in the country by a Jakarta-based research organization that recently released a report on national violence rates during 2014.

The Habibie Center'€™s research showed that North Sumatra was the most violent place in Indonesia, with 1,809 reported violence cases in 2014. That was followed by East Java with 1,550, North Sulawesi with 1,207, South Sumatra with 1,078 and, in the fifth rank, Greater Jakarta with a total of 934 violence cases.

According to the research, 360 of the cases in Greater Jakarta took the form of violence committed by the members of the public against alleged thieves.

This showed that the public had no trust in law enforcers and thought that prevailing laws did not have a deterrent effect against violence or theft, the organization reported.

A motorcycle thief in Pondok Aren, South Tangerang, Banten, south of Jakarta, for example, was set alight by a mob on Feb. 24 after being caught while he and three others were trying to rob two persons in the area.

The Habibie Center outlined several causes of the violence in Greater Jakarta, among which are uncertain law enforcement, rapid urbanization and a lack of city infrastructure and open spaces.

The Jakarta Development Planning Board deputy head Yurianto said during the event in which the research results were released to the public that the administration has made several policies to curb the crime rate, such as paying subsidies to improve facilities in satellite cities in order to help reduce urban growth, applying smart city applications with which the public could report anything related to the Jakarta'€™s infrastructure and constructing more parks.

However, Jo Santoso, head of the graduate program in urban planning at Tarumanagara University in Jakarta, criticized the administration, saying that good governance and the smart city concept and applications would never work if the system was still crooked.

He noted that all this time the citizens have never been involved in any of the city'€™s policy-making.

'€œYou can see the city'€™s resources belong to only a few financially strong persons who also control the city'€™s policies,'€ he said.

A lack of public participation has meant the city'€™s development has not taken place in line with the needs of its people, he added.

Jo recommended the drafting of a law to free cities from being subject to government systems and policies that were not in line with their own needs and to allow cities to develop planning based on the needs of their residents.

An anti-violence city is a city owned by its own citizens, which means the public must take part in its development, he said as quoted by the report. (prm)