The government should review the existing police recruitment system to avoid hiring people who may not be fit for the highly stressful occupation, a Central Police University professor, Yeh Yu-lan (葉毓蘭), said after a young female police officer on Thursday killed herself with a standard-issue police pistol.
The National Police Agency (NPA) has said it would not change its policy of issuing handguns to female police officers on the beat or on field assignments, but promised to offer better counseling to staff.
However, Yeh said the NPA's response did not go far enough. She said the agency should conduct a thorough review of its recruitment policy and implement changes to make sure that only mentally fit applicants join the force.
The police officer was only identified by her surname, Tsai (蔡), a 28-year-old graduate of National Kaohsiung University's department of law. She joined the police in 2005 after passing a local police recruitment examination.
Tsai reportedly had told her boyfriend, also a police officer, on the phone hours before her suicide that she had a heavy workload and was under a lot of pressure.
Tsai did not leave a suicide note.
Yeh said Tsai's suicide was not surprising.
“As evidenced in Tsai's case, police work is very stressful ... The incident highlights the importance of recruiting truly qualified people to join the police ranks,” Yeh said.
“Applicants who score high in written tests may not necessarily be able to cope with the stresses of work, life and relationships,” Yeh said.
Police administrators should pay more attention to the mental state and capacity of applicants, Yeh said, adding that only mentally strong and healthy people should be given access to guns.
She said that in Hong Kong, police recruits are required to pass a long-term assessment of emotional control, mental balance, communication skills and real-time judgment.
Attracted by the relatively high pay and job security, an increasing number of young women have entered the local police ranks in the past decade, Yeh said.
As the number of female officers continues to grow, they are no longer limited to desk jobs, but are being given field assignments, which tend to be very stressful, Yeh said.
NPA statistics show that Taiwan has more than 3,400 female police officers, accounting for 5 percent of the force.
Tsai was not the first policewoman to commit suicide. In 2008, an assistant criminal detective killed herself by inhaling charcoal fumes.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching