Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Chien Yu-yen (簡余晏) yesterday condemned the Taipei City Police Department for targeting ordinary people and even the media in a recent report instead of acknowledging its own violent behavior.
The department filed a report earlier this week that reviewed police performance during the visit of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) last month and their handling of various protests against Chen.
Chien, who posted a copy of the report on her Web site on Tuesday, condemned the department for ignoring its own violent acts against the protesters while pledging to purchase more barricades and asking the media to refrain from getting near protest sites.
“The police should not be bodyguards for anyone. They are the people’s servants, and they should never try to stop the media from reporting what is happening,” she said yesterday at the Taipei City Council.
The police report suggested that the police should have “separated the media” from the protesters before they dispersed the protesters from sites so the work of dispersing the crowd could proceed more smoothly.
The report also suggested that the police should receive more training on how to disperse the crowd and the media.
“It’s unbelievable to learn that after reviewing its own performance, the police decided that the proper measure should be to disperse the media first,” she said.
Chien urged the department and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to stop targeting the media and the protesters and instead cultivate the police’s sense of democracy.
In protest against police brutality during Chen’s visit and the police’s failure to acknowledge its abuse of power, Chien and several DPP Taipei City councilors, including Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄), Liu Yao-ren (劉耀仁) and Huang Hsiang-chun (黃向群), held an event next to the Wuchang Street (武昌街) police station last night.
The councilors played Taiwanese songs and condemned the police for abusing their power to protect Chinese officials.
Chien lashed out at Ma for encouraging police officers to target their own people, and said the DPP’s Taipei City caucus will continue its investigation into police brutality to identify guilty officers.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
The Taipei City Government yesterday said contractors organizing its New Year’s Eve celebrations would be held responsible after a jumbo screen played a Beijing-ran television channel near the event’s end. An image showing China Central Television (CCTV) Channel 3 being displayed was posted on the social media platform Threads, sparking an outcry on the Internet over Beijing’s alleged political infiltration of the municipal government. A Taipei Department of Information and Tourism spokesman said event workers had made a “grave mistake” and that the Television Broadcasts Satellite (TVBS) group had the contract to operate the screens. The city would apply contractual penalties on TVBS
RSS