Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-hua (江宜樺) said yesterday that the ministry would come up with a plan to sanction police officers with a poor work attitude through reassignment.
Jiang, however, disagreed with Premier Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) suggestion that such officers be transferred to rural police stations.
“When a police officer does not perform well, we will not let them stay in a position that is very important, honorable or with a good chance of promotion,” Jiang said. “Rather, we will transfer the officer to a ‘punishment position’ where the officer will be able to think about what they have done wrong.”
“That doesn’t mean that we would transfer the officer to a ‘remote’ place,” he said.
When asked what would be considered a “punishment position,” Jiang said there was no set standard, rather punishment positions may vary from place to place.
He said, for instance, what would be considered a punishment in Taoyuan County may differ from a punishment in Pingtung County, “but the point is to let the officer know that he or she is being transferred because they did not perform well or did not work hard enough.”
“There will not be a set of standards defining that a transfer to a police station with less than a certain number of officers is a punishment,” Jiang said.
He said that the ministry would come up with a detailed plan within a month and submit it to the Executive Yuan.
Jiang’s remarks seemed to contradict those of the premier, who told a question-and-answer session at the legislature on Tuesday that he would consider transferring police officers with a bad attitude to “less populated precincts.”
Wu’s comment immediately drew criticism from several Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers.
DPP Legislator Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) said it would be unfair to people living in remote areas if they only got “bad officers,” while Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said transferring lazy officers to remote precincts may be in fact be a reward, as there would be less work to do.
A 25-year-old Taipei County police officer, who wished to remain anonymous, supported Tsai’s view.
“You would see a lot more young officers like me in Taipei than anywhere else because everyone wants to go to less populated precincts in central or southern Taiwan, but the approval for transfer applications is based on an unwritten seniority system,” the officer told the Taipei Times. “All officers get paid about the same money, but there is a lot more work to do in Taipei County and Taipei City.”
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