Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said yesterday that the city's Education Bureau and schools had overlooked the importance of resolving the problem of bullying on campus.
Chen said city government agencies should acknowledge the issue and study how to ensure campus security.
“I will put Deputy Mayor Lee [Yung-te (李永得)] in charge. I want to see updated reports and statistics every six months,” she said.
Chen was responding to concerns raised on the council floor by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) City Councilor Lin Kuo-cheng (林國正) about campus security.
Lin accused the city government of failing to take campus security seriously.
Lin cited the latest statistics from the National Police Agency (NPA) showing that the city's crime rate had reached 6.28 criminals per 100,000 people, while Taipei City only had a crime rate of 3.53 offenders per 100,000 people.
NPA data also showed that the number of teenagers on drugs in Kaohsiung was about 1.78 times that in Taipei City, Lin said.
Chen said many school bullies or teenage drug addicts in the city were from economically disadvantaged families or were dropouts, but the city government would never give up on them.
“The issue of campus security is a matter of conscience,” Chen said, adding that the city government would never evade the issue.
In other news, the city's Economic Development Bureau urged residents of Dapingding (大坪頂) to learn to live in harmony with the Caprimulgus affinis after residents complained about the noise made by the birds.
Bureau director-general Liu Hsin-cheng (劉馨正) said an increasing number of the rare birds, commonly known as the Savanna Nightjar, had migrated to urban areas in recent years.
Many Siaogang District (小港) residents had complained about having difficulty sleeping because of the constant chirping made by the birds during the mating season, Liu said.
Saying that the mating season would last through August, Liu urged residents to strike a balance between their lives and protection of the birds.
The inspection equipment and data transmission system for new robotic dogs that Taipei is planning to use for sidewalk patrols were developed by a Taiwanese company, the city’s New Construction Office said today, dismissing concerns that the China-made robots could pose a security risk. The city is bringing in smart robotic dogs to help with sidewalk inspections, Taipei Deputy Mayor Lee Ssu-chuan (李四川) said on Facebook. Equipped with a panoramic surveillance system, the robots would be able to automatically flag problems and easily navigate narrow sidewalks, making inspections faster and more accurate, Lee said. By collecting more accurate data, they would help Taipei
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A 72-year-old man in Kaohsiung was sentenced to 40 days in jail after he was found having sex with a 67-year-old woman under a slide in a public park on Sunday afternoon. At 3pm on Sunday, a mother surnamed Liang (梁) was with her child at a neighborhood park when they found the man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and woman, surnamed Huang (黃), underneath the slide. Liang took her child away from the scene, took photographs of the two and called the police, who arrived and arrested the couple. During questioning, Tsai told police that he had met Huang that day and offered to
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