Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der has de­fend­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to ex­tend the sec­ond State of Emer­gency (SoE) for an­oth­er three months, cit­ing thou­sands of po­lice op­er­a­tions, ar­rests and crim­i­nal charges as ev­i­dence the SoE mea­sures have helped law en­force­ment dis­rupt crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty and make sig­nif­i­cant progress in the fight against crime.

Dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the de­bate on the ex­ten­sion of the SoE in Par­lia­ment on Wednes­day, Alexan­der ar­gued that the use of Pre­ven­ta­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs) are cru­cial to stop­ping crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty be­fore it even oc­curs.

A PDO is not a crim­i­nal charge, but rather a le­gal or­der used to pre­vent con­duct deemed a threat to pub­lic safe­ty. It does not mean a per­son has com­mit­ted a crime. In­stead, it is grant­ed when suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence is pre­sent­ed to jus­ti­fy the per­son’s de­ten­tion in or­der to pre­vent an­tic­i­pat­ed harm­ful or dan­ger­ous ac­tions.