Suggestions for police
The National Police Agency recently created a Web site where the public can comment on how and where their taxpayer dollars are being spent. I applaud this effort. While I agree that bootleg cigarettes are a big problem in Taiwan, I’m not going to suggest they go around arresting old ladies for selling them. Instead, I recently sent them my suggestion about how they could improve their performance and be better stewards of our society, as follows:
To Taiwan’s hardworking police officers,
I’m glad you’ve opened this Web site so that members of the public can communicate with you. I’m a long-term foreign resident of Taiwan, and I believe that the police are active, polite and mostly fair. I watch you working in my Yonghe neighborhood, and I think that the traffic police do an especially good job. The officers who put serial numbers on my motorcycle were also very professional, and fast.
One thing that bothers me about your activities, however, is the fact that policemen on scooters routinely drive around from place to place to sign those cards in the little boxes. While you do this, you have a bad habit of leaving your scooters idling for a minute or more. You’re almost as bad as the mail carriers, who leave their motorcycles running for up to five minutes while stuffing mailboxes or waiting for someone to sign for a registered mail.
This is terribly wasteful. You should turn your engines off when you’re not moving. First, your job is to protect the public, but your dirty smoke is polluting the air we all use. Second, you’re wasting gasoline and I, as a taxpayer who pays not only your salary but also your fuel costs, feel that you should set a better example for the public and conserve as much gasoline as you can. All the people of Taiwan need to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions, so you should cut down on your stinky pollution.
Every local police office should keep track of how much public money is spent on gasoline and put the results online so that we taxpayers can see the exact cost of all the police scooters and motorcycles in the country. You should initiate a program to reward police officers who improve their mileage and promote cleaner air. Further, all officers should look for scooters that emit stinky white smoke and encourage those drivers to get new oil and spark plugs at a local scooter shop.
I feel sorry for the many street-corner traffic control officers who work in some of the dirtiest conditions imaginable. Hundreds of scooters idle at hundreds of lights around Taipei for more than a minute, and your brave officers are working in a carcinogenic vortex of filth. Did you know that every 13 minutes and 30 seconds, someone in Taiwan dies of cancer? About 20 percent of these deaths are from lung cancer. Wasteful traffic pollution is a big part of this. I hope all of the nation’s traffic police go to a local clinic or hospital for regular health checks, including ear, nose, throat and lung testing.
There’s only one Earth, and only one atmosphere, and I hope you agree that we all need to share the air. Your kids and my kids need a place to breathe freely. Together, let’s make Taiwan a clean-air paradise.
Torch Pratt
Yonghe City, Taipei County
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