An incident on Thursday last week between a police officer and a woman walking in the area behind Jhongli Railway Station in Taoyuan has drawn public attention to proportionality in policing.
The incident ended with a Jhongli Police Precinct officer, surnamed Yeh (葉), wrestling the screaming woman, Chan Hui-ling (詹慧玲), to the sidewalk in a judo maneuver, pressing her face to the ground, and then detaining her for nine hours in the police station.
Chan, a music teacher, had refused to produce her identification card on Yeh’s request after he approached her to do a spot check. The situation quickly deteriorated when Yeh was affronted by an insult that Chan allegedly used against him.
According to Article 11, Subparagraph 3 of the Police Duty Act (警察勤務條例), police are authorized to conduct spot checks “at public places or designated and specific roads to question suspicious people” as part of law enforcement.
However, while noting this stipulation in the law, the Council of Grand Justices’ Interpretation No. 535 also states that “spot checks, including inspections, street checks or interrogations may have substantial effects upon personal freedom, property rights and the right to privacy,” and rules that “such checks must be exercised in accordance with specific legal principles guiding police functions and law enforcement.”
That is, out of concern for the right to freedom and privacy, even though police have the power to conduct spot checks, this must be done not only according to specific laws and stipulations, but also with a sense of proportionality.
Interpretation No. 535 was requested and issued in 2001. The request was made in light of a similar case in 1998, when a man was stopped at night for a spot check, and refused when asked for his identification card, leading to an altercation with the police officer. The man insulted the officer and was detained on the basis of “insulting a public officer discharging his or her legal duties.” He ended up serving a jail sentence.
The two cases are remarkably similar in how the situation deteriorated. The difference between this most recent incident and the one from more than two decades ago was that Chan and another person standing several meters away recorded the altercation on their phones. The videos were posted on social media.
Video footage shows how Yeh initiated the check by saying that he had never seen the woman before — a ridiculous assertion in a beat near a busy train station — and that he was concerned she was a missing person. Chan was visibly confused by why she was stopped, refused to comply and reacted by using a moderately insulting epithet, angering Yeh who pushed her to the ground. There was clearly no reasonable cause for Yeh to allow the situation to deteriorate so quickly, and his reaction was disproportionate to the situation.
Chan’s reaction was entirely human, born as it was of fear and confusion; Yeh’s reaction was also human, as he felt he had been slighted and his authority challenged. However, it is not acceptable for the personal feelings of somebody wielding so much power to be brought to bear in this way. This is why there are laws governing these situations, and this is why a constitutional interpretation was made to clarify the police’s power and the public’s rights.
Yeh needs to be disciplined, but the crux of the problem has to be explored at the level of police training, including awareness of the law and of how to deal with members of the public in a respectful way that ensures their rights are protected, and how to diffuse situations that have deteriorated unnecessarily.
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