Altogether 366 policemen sacrificed their lives and 3,806 got wounded on duty from January to November last year, said Bai Jingfu, vice minister of public security.
Bai said at a meeting that a program urging the police to serve the people, seek truth from facts, and enforce the law strictly, fairly and politely, was carried out in police bureaus across China since the beginning of last year. Over 2,000 police bureaus at county level and nearly 800,000 policemen were involved in the program.
According to Bai, more than 16,700 unqualified policemen were suspended from their posts to attend a special training. The program ended up in solving a series of problems, such as treating the massed of people roughly, enforcing the law unfairly, violating the legal procedures, extorting confession by means of torture, and non-policemen participating in law enforcement, thereby getting their law enforcement into a right track and improving the overall quality.
It is said that China's police will from now on focus attention on enforcing the law strictly and politely, making efforts to prevent the cropping-up of, and crack down on, crimes, and voluntarily receive the supervision from the people.
(People's Daily 01/15/2001)
