Minister’s Awards Presentation Ceremony 2024 – Speech by Mr K Shanmugam, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Law

Home Team Colleagues,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

1. A very good afternoon to all of you.

2. Today we are going to give more than a hundred awards for outstanding service, and operational excellence.

3. Essentially, if you look at the award recipients, they demonstrate a number of qualities:

(a) First , working together as One Home Team.

(b) Second , adapting to new technologies.

(c) Third , the way in which we collaborated with other government partners, across agencies, across different government ministries.

4. So let me look at and share with you some of these examples.

Working as One Home Team

5. We have for several years been emphasising working together as one unit in the Home Team. And this year, we had our first Home Team Day, really to try and strengthen our Home Team identity. The team behind that event, the first Home Team Day, is one of the award recipients.

6. We also launched the Home Team Culture Guide. It's really, when you join the Home Team with new colleagues, what is the meaning of home team? What does it mean to be a member of the Home Team?

7. So this guide covers the milestones of Home Team, the values that we share, the behaviours that we want, and the models that people ought to have – we try to inculcate within the Home Team. The mindset of a one Home Team is also considerably strengthened through experiences that we share, which means joint trainings, joint events, including this ceremony.

8. In fact, more than half of today’s Operational Excellence Awards involve cross-agency cooperation. And that indicates, that shows, really, that this identity of a single Home Team is now deeply rooted.

9. For example, if you look at drugs. CNB and SPF, joining together, working together as one unit, is now pretty much the norm. They conducted many successful joint ops in the last year.

10. In August [2023], CNB and SPF conducted a joint raid. They arrested 49 suspected drug abusers . Now, this is the highest number arrested in a single raid in the last year. The raid was done on National Day, which is a public holiday for everyone else except the Home Team.

11. In another case, officers disrupted a local drug distribution network. They arrested a suspect linked to a Malaysian syndicate. More importantly, or equally importantly, the arrest led to a seizure of significant amounts of drugs.

12. And earlier this year, ICA, together with SPF, engaged in enforcement efforts, saw the arrest and deportation of suspects from Singapore.

13. The investigation found that two that were arrested were leaders of a transnational organised crime group, and they ran a large online scam operation.

14. S$7 million worth of items were seized, including cars and luxury items.

15. That then led to many other arrests outside of Singapore, and the syndicate has been crippled. If you look at SPF and SCDF, they've also cooperated well in protecting property and lives.

16. Earlier this year, there was a large fire in a fish farm near Pulau Tekong, and 13 lives were saved because of the combined efforts of Police Coast Guard (PCG) and SCDF. The 13 were evacuated from the farm by PCG, while SCDF fought the fire.

Technology and Innovation

17. From there, joint ops, we move to technology. We have talked about technology many times.

18. Now practical application – Prisons. It's looking at its rehabilitation strategy, and it’s used an upgraded Electronic Monitoring Service (EMS), and also something called the Self-Help & Rehabilitation E-Application (SHARE).

19. Now, what does SHARE do? SHARE provides the supervisees access to a centralised job database. What do they look for? They look for jobs. Instead of looking for it themselves, there's a centralised job database, and also a centralised community support resource available so they can go check their rehabilitation journey, they can take charge of their progress, and this has helped Prisons streamline its case management, so they can give more focused support, targeted support, timely support, to the families, and to the supervisees.

20. Another example: HTX and ICA have jointly developed something they call HText. It's one of the Home Team’s first ventures involving Generative AI and Large Language Models.

21. Now this is a very significant development for the Home Team. The trials have increased, improved ICA’s, intel and sense-making capabilities.

22. With HText, what you get is emails, news, reports, all relating to border security – aggregated, and also you get classification and summarisation of immigration offences that gives actionable insights to the officers.

23. ICA’s sense is that HText has achieved good results, and we look at it, likely to roll it out to other Home Team Departments.

24. HText was developed in four months, which is very much faster than norms for the industry.

25. Third , the learning from this successful use of Generative AI is likely to reduce the amount of time that is going to be required to develop other AI tools for the Home Team.

Collaboration With WOG and Community Partners

26. So let me now turn to collaboration across government and with community partners.

27. To really help protect Singaporeans from scams, SPF and HTX have partnered GovTech to develop what we call the Scam Analytics and Tactical Intervention System (SATIS).

28. SATIS uses AI and machine learning to make it easier, faster, to detect, analyse, and disrupt scam websites targeting Singaporeans.

29. Now, as of July this year, 42,000 such websites have been identified using SATIS.

30. Last year, SPF, Ministry HQ (MHQ), and our counterparts across Government came together very quickly, to reduce tensions, deal with the situation, related to people who are remitting money to China from Singapore.

31. What had happened was that about S$17 million remitted from Singapore by Work Permit Holders – employees back home to China was frozen by the PRC authorities.

32. There were more than 900 police reports . Many of the remitters affected were migrant workers.

33. They could not get information on the state of frozen funds, led to large gatherings. They were obviously anxious, and they went to call the remittance agencies, they went to the PRC embassy - there was   potential for it to become a public order issue.

34. The Home Team brought together various Government agencies and led the coordination.

35. MFA and SPF engaged their counterparts in China, to really ask why have these funds been frozen, how could the people who were remitting address the concerns of the PRC authorities.

36. SPF, Manpower Ministry and MAS also engaged the affected remitters to advise them on their options.

37. The regulations were reviewed, allegations were investigated, of improper management, fraud. And all of this – the multi-agency effort was led by MHQ and we had various partners – MDDI, PMO Comms Group, Pro Bono SG, and Migrant Workers’ Centre.

38. And Home Team officers have also been strengthening partnerships with the community.

39. For example, Yellow Ribbon Singapore (YRSG) works with like-minded industry partners in something called YR Connects initiative . What does it do? It improves the employability and employment of inmates and ex-offenders.

40. Last year, YRSG expanded the YR Connects to bring in NTUC.

41. As a result, another 270 companies have come onboard, registered, to look at ex-offenders as potential employees.

Conclusion

42. If you look at the environment, it's more complex. The operational landscape is more difficult. The global developments are uncertain. Technology is evolving with ever tighter manpower constraints. Everything that has been done must be seen against the backdrop of all these increased pressures.

43. And despite these pressures, Ministry and the Home Team departments have done extremely well, and that's only possible because of your hard work – the hard work of all of our Home Team colleagues, your adaptability and the clarity of Home Team’s mission, and the support you give for that mission.

44. So well done, and congratulations again to all recipients, and everyone in Home Team.

45. Thank you.