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The capital’s public order officers would be more helpful stamping out smoking in public places rather than being deployed to round up the city’s less fortunate, a city councilor said on Tuesday.

Councilor Azas Tigor Nainggolan, who also chairs the Jakarta Residents Forum (Fakta), slammed Governor Fauzi Bowo’s annual sweeping operations, which are currently under way to clear beggars, buskers the homeless from the city’s streets before Ramadan.

“They can, for starters, begin to enforce the so-called anti-smoking decree issued by the governor,” he said, adding that he recently had to leave a food court at a mall in South Jakarta because of all the smokers.

“I could not stand the smell — and this was an enclosed public space. Where are the public order officers when you need them? They should be doing this instead of running after buskers.”

Wanda Hamidah, from City Council’s Commission E, which oversees welfare issues, said the Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) should not only focus on the “small people.”

“A lot of middle- and upper-class people also violate bylaws. Aside from the smoking bylaw, they violate building permits and the city’s spatial planning regulations. They should also be brought to justice,” she said.

But in the lead-up to the holy month of Ramadan, Wanda acknowledged there would be many more poorer residents from the city’s outskirts flooding into the capital in order to beg.

“It’s a month of forgiveness, when Muslims have the urge to be more charitable, and they take advantage of this opportunity,” she said.

“But this also means that it’s not a problem of the Jakarta government alone, but also of the governments where these people came from.”

Wanda said that other local administrations had failed to develop their regional economies and therefore their residents had resorted to begging in more affluent areas to make ends meet.

“Besides, even after they are expelled by the Satpol PP, they can always come back to Jakarta,” she added.

As many as 550 Satpol PP officers are being readied to begin more crackdowns today on the city’s undesirables before Ramadan begins next month.

Satpol PP Chief Effendi Anas said beggars would first be given warnings before being rounded up and detained at rehabilitation shelters.

Separately, Ridwan Pandjaitan, head of law enforcement at the city’s Environmental Management Agency (BPLHD), said the penalties set out in the anti-smoking decree were too steep, and “therefore it is impractical to conduct raids.”

He said the penalties would be revised to reduce the maximum prison term to three months from six months and bring the fine down to Rp 5 million ($555) instead of Rp 50 million.