The incident in which Hakka Affairs Council Minister Lee Yung-te (李永得) was stopped and questioned by a police officer while out in casual clothes has caused a lot of controversy, but it is not so much a matter of law as it is of police professionalism — or the lack of it.
Police officers have on the surface become quite polite and happy to help the public, bowing to demands from elected leaders and legislative bodies in the many years since democratization.
However, when they encounter complex situations that call for deeper democratic convictions and legal logic, the old authoritarian mindset tends to make them go over the top. When they do not know what to do, their performance is rather poor.
Taking this incident as an example, the police were unprofessional all the way from initiation and procedure of the check to the explanations given when questioned after the fact.
If the explanation given by the Taipei Police Department’s Mobile Division is to be believed and there was ample justification for initiating a check, then the bystander who intervened on Lee’s behalf was clearly obstructing official police duties. If so, the police should have stopped the passerby from interfering so that they could go through with procedure. If they no longer suspected anything after talking to the person concerned, they should have informed the bystander and thanked him for his cooperation.
However, the police allowed the passerby to pester and bicker with them while letting Lee come and go as he pleased. If this was not due to outright incompetence, then the check must have been unnecessary to begin with, or else the police did it just to notch up performance points. Otherwise, if there really were sufficient grounds to initiate the check, why did they make such a big fuss, leave the matter unsettled and watch the resentful suspect walk away?
Surely the police owe us an explanation.
Checks are a serious police power and it is quite hard to know where to draw the line.
In the US, such checks are known as “stop and frisk.” In their first televised presidential debate last year, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and US President Donald Trump locked horns over the constitutionality of stop and frisk.
In 1968, the US Supreme Court made a decision about the constitutionality of searches and seizures. Its reasoning and limitations were similar to those seen in Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 535 in 2001.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had great faith in the effectiveness of police checks, and during his term, he gave free rein to the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to unrestrainedly harass suspicious people on the street. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, expanded this policy, so that in the peak year of 2011, the NYPD carried out more than 680,000 stop and frisk checks; in other years, about 500,000 checks were made.
These two mayors and Trump all believe that such large-scale stop-and-frisk checks were the main reason for a big fall in the city’s crime rate, but rigorous criminological research has repeatedly shown that there are other reasons for the improvement. Some analyses even indicate that stop-and-frisk checks have had a negative effect on cutting robbery and theft, while causing friction between the police and the public, and provoking widespread discontent.
In 2013, US District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s implementation of stop and frisk was unconstitutional.
Then-mayor Bloomberg protested loudly, saying that Scheindlin “ignored the real-world realities of crime” and announced his intention to appeal.
However, the next mayor eventually abandoned the appeal process. The number of search and frisks proceeded to fall to just over 40,000 in 2014 and just over 20,000 in 2015 — less than one-30th of the peak number.
However, New York’s crime rate has continued falling and did not increase as a result of this policy change. In comparison, there are between 600,000 and 700,000 police checks every year in Chicago, but the city continues to suffer a high crime rate.
Although New York now has a much lower need for police checks, a lot still happen. This might be a necessary evil, but the effects tend to be exaggerated.
There is plenty of criminological research showing that politicians who blindly believe in the effectiveness of stop and frisk generally turn a blind eye to the research. Interestingly, there is research to show that building regulations adopted in New York from the 1990s onward greatly reduced the amount of lead in the environment, and that that is what made the greatest contribution to crime reduction.
In other words, the changes in behavior that are caused by lead are undetectable by ordinary people, but scientific evidence carries much greater weight than the intuitive impression that stop and frisk has a deterrent effect.
Maybe for Taiwan to cut its crime rate, apart from improving police training, the Environmental Protection Administration must also cut the amount of lead in the environment. After all, this has been scientifically proven to be more effective than stop and frisk.
Li Chung-chih is a professor at Illinois State University’s School of Information Technology and a member of the North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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