Nearly half of Taiwanese believe that overall public safety is worse than before, a survey released yesterday by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) found.
The results showed that 13.6 percent of respondents believed that overall public safety is better than before, while 26 percent of respondents believed that it is about the same and 11.6 percent said that they did not know.
Asked about Premier Su Tseng-chang’s (蘇貞昌) statement that “unnecessary meetings” should not be held during the COVID-19 pandemic — in response to lawmakers’ criticism that the Executive Yuan’s last interagency public security meeting was more than a year ago, instead of every two months — 68.9 percent of respondents did not agree, while nearly 18 percent agreed and 13.3 percent said they did not know.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Asked about President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) pledge in her 2016 inaugural address that her administration would strengthen the social safety net, 61.3 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the government’s efforts, while 20.6 percent said they were satisfied and 18.1 percent said they did not know.
The survey, which was conducted on Thursday and Friday last week, collected 916 valid samples through telephone interviews and has a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.
The government’s “very bad” performance on public safety has created panic in people’s minds, KMT Culture and Communications Committee director-general Alicia Wang (王育敏) told a news conference in Taipei.
The results “represent the voice of the public,” she said, urging the government to re-evaluate itself.
Last month’s abduction and murder of a Malaysian woman studying at Chang Jung Christian University in Tainan has sparked discussion about public safety and spurred calls to improve safety on school campuses.
The National Policy Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the KMT, yesterday also called a news conference to discuss school campus safety.
There were 167,696 campus safety-related incidents reported in 2016, 136,615 in 2017 and 151,220 in 2018, the foundation said, citing Ministry of Education statistics.
The incidents included 792 deaths in 2016, 893 deaths in 2017 and 859 deaths in 2018, said Kao Yuang-kuang (高永光), convener of the foundation’s Education, Culture and Sports Division.
Incidents of violent or deviant behavior on school campuses increased each year from 2016 to 2018, with 6,959 incidents reported in 2016, 7,756 in 2017 and 8,660 in 2018, he said, citing ministry statistics.
In 2018, violent or deviant behavior on school campuses was reported to have affected 15,847 people, Kao said.
The figures demonstrated the severity of the issue, Kao added.
Of the 151,220 incidents reported in 2018, 21,187 involved the safety of students aged 18 or younger, he said.
“As parents ... we hope that when our children go to school, the school is a safe place,” he said.
The number of junior-high students reported for drug abuse increased from 164 in 2018 to 184 last year, Kao said, citing a Ministry of Health and Welfare report.
While the number of senior-high students reported for drug abuse decreased from 498 in 2017 to 321 in 2018 and 315 last year, the total remains “quite shocking,” he said.
There were warning signs before the murder of the Malaysian student, but those were not taken seriously, KMT Legislator Lee De-wei (李德維) said.
Educators should teach students from a young age to look out for each other, he said.
KMT lawmakers would discuss legislation to improve the safety of students on campuses, he added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater