[quote=“hansioux”]That’s because under Chiangs’ dictatorships selective prosecution was used as a way to intimidate and coerce people into falling in line. Whenever the police bust you, if it was not for a political purpose, then the police were just trying to extort bribes and have a quick pay day.
The police didn’t bother doing anything, unless a case receives national attention and there’s pressure coming from above, then everyone scrambles to find a scapegoat. Find a likely enough suspect, then torture to get a confession, that’s the police’s goto technique. It was that way as late as the early 1990s. The police tortured the “suspects” in the Lu Zheng (陸政) abduction case, and even recorded themselves torturing the suspects and talking about how easy it was to get them to say anything they wanted. It was also that way in the Jiang Guoqing (江國慶) case, where Jiang was accuse of raping and killing a five-year old gril. Jiang was executed in 1997. They found the real killer Xu Rongzhou (許榮洲) in the year 2000. They tortured an confession out of Jiang and then killed him.
The average Taiwanese children who grew up before 2000 were taught to fear the police. So when the rule of law is actually enforced, it feels like a punishment rather than justice being served.
The police needs to shake their past images, and to do so they need to become efficient, impartial and professional. Same goes for prosecutors and judges. With the handling of the CSB cases and KMT corruption cases, such as the one by Lin Shiyi, let’s just say they have ways to go to be redeemed in the minds of the public.[/quote]
Fear the police? Really? Once, when I was back in Taiwan, my uncle got stopped by a police car. It pulled up in front of him when he stopped. My uncle walked out of the car, walked to the police car and stuck his head in their car and talked to them. There was no fear. And, try doing that in the USA and you’d get shot.