Regardless of the legal predicament that you may find yourself in, more often than not, lodging a police report would be a crucial step in rectifying the matter. In fact, in one of our previous articles, we detailed how a police report plays a big role in cases of assault under criminal law, as well as how it can be used as evidence in a civil suit.
However, the process of filing a police report can sometimes be tedious, especially if you’re not familiar with the procedure. Speaking of which, did you know that even for relatively minor matters such as the loss of passport, the procedure for you to get it replaced requires for a police report to be made first?
Understandably, this can cause quite a backlog of work for police officers and worse, unnecessarily make police stations become crowded. Remember at the start of the Movement Control Order (MCO) when the standard operating procedure (SOP) for cross-district travel required you to get permission from the police and how it caused massive crowds to gather there? Surely, the police have better things to do than to spend hours entertaining people on minor issues such as loss of documents due to negligence and so on.
Thankfully, for these minor cases, you don’t actually have to physically be at the police station to lodge a police report. In fact, the good folks at Royal Malaysia Police (PDRM) have actually created an online portal specifically for minor cases to be reported so as to make lives easier for Malaysians.
Called e-Reporting PDRM, the service is an initiative by PDRM to provide online convenience for the public to submit complaints to the police via the internet. It can be accessed here.
Before we get in depth on how to submit a police report through the portal, here’s some things you need to know about the e-service. Firstly, the e-Reporting portal can only be used for matters not related to crime, which include the following:
As mentioned before, the caveat for using the e-service is that the matter being reported must not be related or caused by criminal activity. For example, the loss of an identity card must not be due to it being stolen and so on.
Moving on, the first thing you have to do to utilise the service is to register as a new user. Fill in the necessary details at the new user registration web page here and submit by clicking the ‘Register User’ option.
Then, return to the home page and login using your Identity Card number and your password. Read the reminder and warning and tick the boxes confirming that you’re a Malaysian above 18 years old as well as confirming that the police report that you’re lodging doesn’t involve any criminal matters and press next.
Afterwards, answer the questions in regards to the police report and press ‘OK’. Then, you’ll be directed to the ‘Police Report’ section of the e-Reporting PDRM service where you have to fill in your personal details, incident details, description of incident and confirmation.
You can then print the police report after submission or get a copy of it via email. The police report can then be used when applying for a replacement to your lost documents at the relevant agencies.
Pretty straightforward, right? So the next time you find yourself in the situations mentioned, you can just skip the queue at the police station and file a police report from the comforts of your own home through e-Reporting PDRM.
For more insights and tips such as this, do make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram or visit our official website. You can also read our articles on the popular Malaysian news aggregator app Newswav here.
