Wednesday, April 11, 2012 -
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev suggested to police and the interior ministry on Wednesday that they should crack down more stringently on the perpetrators of small crimes in the Kazakh city Astana.
He said that people should be imprisoned for three days for sticking chewing gum in inappropriate places.
“We cannot close our eyes to small crimes in the city,” the Tengrinews.kz news agency reported Nazarbayev as saying in the government meeting.
“If they stick the gums in every corner, we have to catch them, record the crimes, take the fingerprints. People have to be warned! Administrative punishments, fines and imprisonment for three days should be introduced. All small criminals have to be caught on the streets and everybody has to know they will be punished. That’s when we have the order and there will be no small crimes,” Nazarbayev said.
Nazarbayev is insistent that Astana, the capital which he established when he stripped southern city Almaty of the honor, be the safest city in the Central Asian state.
The longtime president looks to New York as the example to follow in police strategy.
“New York used to be the most criminal city in the U.S.,” Nazarbayev said. “The new mayor and the new police head started with the small crimes, started with those who don’t pay for the rides in subway. They arrested 800 such criminals a day.
“When small crimes stopped, people understood that punishment comes for everything.”