A police cadet standing to the left in a photograph has the muzzle of a handgun in his mouth, while a classmate standing next to him, in full uniform and smiling, levels a second handgun at the cadet's temple.
Other grainy photographs show similarly disturbing scenes of what Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiang Lien-fu (
"I received the pictures as a file attached to an anonymous e-mail from a Taipei police academy and I was just appalled," Chiang told the Taipei Times after displaying the photographs at a press conference in the legislature on Friday.
The file contained 30 photographs of cadets playing with guns by pointing them at one another, at a salamander and at other random targets.
Other pictures showed cadets viewing pornography in class and drinking alcohol in their dormitories, he said.
"My goal in holding such a press conference was to urge the National Police Agency to better educate our police and investigate why such breaches in discipline are occurring," Chiang said by telephone yesterday.
Responding to Chiang's allegations that police cadets are poorly trained, Taiwan Police College training director Chen Hung (
But, Chen added, it is possible that cadets horse around with guns and take photos when instructors are not present.
"We will enforce discipline," Chen said.
Even if the firearms shown in the photos are merely pellet guns, the cadets' actions reveal a disturbing lack of discipline in handling sidearms and are indicative of a severe lack of gun training among police officers nationwide, Chiang said.
He cited two separate cases last week in Tainan in which officers lost their guns to dangerous criminals because of poor judgment, saying the photos were part of a disturbing trend.
In one case, two suspects in a high-speed police chase crashed their vehicle into a median. In the ensuing struggle with police, one suspect snatched a policeman's gun and used it to shoot at the officer after the officer had approached the smashed vehicle.
Although the police officer managed to escape injury, the armed suspect also shot at a passing driver in an attempt to hijack a vehicle.
The injured driver swerved off the road into a ditch and was killed.
The suspects succeeded in hijacking a different vehicle and escaped. Police nabbed one of the suspects on Tuesday, but not before arresting the wrong person first -- a mentally challenged Tainan man -- and releasing him after apologizing to him and his family.
"The pictures are just one of many examples of how too many police officers just don't know how to handle their sidearms," Chiang said.
Taiwanese police are notorious for their poor firearms training and tendency to be trigger happy, he added.
In February last year, a gunshot fired by a policeman in Tainan missed a suspect and killed a 14-year-old girl who was watching the dramatic scene unfold from approximately 70m away.
Last September, a wild car chase in Taipei ended when police fired off more than 50 rounds at a fleeing suspect's vehicle, riddling the suspect, who was wanted for burglary, with fatal gunshot wounds.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,