Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators on a legislative committee yesterday refused to review the National Police Agency’s budget, saying they are displeased by the heavy police presence near the Legislative Yuan in Taipei over the past four weeks.
After heated debates failed to reach an agreement to proceed, the meeting of the Internal Administration Committee was adjourned in favor of convening another at a later date.
Since Nov. 3, the number of police officers posted outside the Legislative Yuan has reached 4,000, with 2,000 posted inside the building, KMT Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) said.
“What is going on with this country?” Huang asked.
KMT Legislator Yang Cheng-wu (楊鎮浯) asked Minister of the Interior Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮): “Are you not supposed to be a liberal academic?”
In an apparent attempt to cool tempers, KMT Legislator Chen Chao-ming (陳超明) called a 10-minute break and during the interlude National Police Agency Director-General Chen Kuo-en (陳國恩) approached Huang for a private discussion.
However, the committee continued to struggle to reach a consensus and as a result Chen Chao-ming adjourned the budget review.
At a news conference following the meeting, Chen Kuo-en said the agency had reinforced its presence at the legislature in reaction to repeated breaches of the compound by protesters.
“[Today] there are multiple protests at the [Legislative] Yuan, the Presidential Office Building and other government offices, such as the Executive Yuan and the Department of Labor. Extemporized attempts by various groups to storm government offices or the Presidential Office Building cannot be ruled out; the presence of law enforcement is necessary under these circumstances,” Chen Kuo-en said.
“The allocation of law enforcement resources must be appropriate, necessary and proportionate; we will review [our operations] accordingly,” he added.
Chen Kuo-en said the placement of crowd-control barriers around the legislature is a strategy to de-escalate any conflict through distance, adding that the barriers are used by many police forces for conflict prevention because they are harder for protesters to push down when compared with traditional barbed-wire barriers.
With amendments to the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法) being passed by the Internal Administration Committee that would expand freedom of assembly by abolishing the government’s authority to withhold approval for street protests, the agency expects to have to police more demonstrations, he said.
A greater reliance on physical barriers rather than riot police officers helps to prevent violent clashes and injuries to civilians and officers, he added.
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