What do the Foreign Affairs Police do besides deport people?

Sure it’s best. It’s best for them because then they will have the evidence they need to turn your case over to the prosecutor who will use the same method to indict you. They always say ‘sign and we will let you go.’ Don’t do this. Of course it equals agreeing to it. Otherwise why would they want you to sign so badly. You will probably find that the recording was conveniently off during the part where they told you that signing didn’t mean that you agreed with it. Of course you felt coerced. You were being coerced.

In general, that’s true of all police in Taiwan. Not so the special breed that works on criminal cases. They are the elite and they bully the other normal police around. The regular police are your friends. If you get in trouble, ask them for help. I’ve had them find cell phones and sunglasses, take the keys out of my friend’s scooter when he left them in the ignition (with a helpful little note), rescue people after bike accidents, etc. They are very service oriented unlike those in the US.

How so :ponder: ?

How so :ponder: ?[/quote]

I’ve been on this island a loooong time and have many tales to tell, but unless they’re here already, it’s not likely I’ll be making them public domain, my friend! :wink: But I will say again that I am, and have been, impressed with the FAP. They CAN be very helpful.

How so :ponder: ?[/quote]

I’ve been on this island a loooong time and have many tales to tell, but unless they’re here already, it’s not likely I’ll be making them public domain, my friend! :wink: But I will say again that I am, and have been, impressed with the FAP. They CAN be very helpful.[/quote]

Some people live on one side of the law, while others stray over to the other side of it. For those of us on our side, housecat, the FAP are generally helpful.

How so :ponder: ?[/quote]

I’ve been on this island a loooong time and have many tales to tell, but unless they’re here already, it’s not likely I’ll be making them public domain, my friend! :wink: But I will say again that I am, and have been, impressed with the FAP. They CAN be very helpful.[/quote]

Some people live on one side of the law, while others stray over to the other side of it. For those of us on our side, housecat, the FAP are generally helpful.[/quote]
Have they ever been helpful say in a situation where a foreigner was a victim of a crime? Does anybody have any stories of where they needed help and the FAP were there to save the day?
I remember trying to report a rape that I was an eyewitness to and nothing but a bunch of headaches.

How so :ponder: ?[/quote]

I’ve been on this island a loooong time and have many tales to tell, but unless they’re here already, it’s not likely I’ll be making them public domain, my friend! :wink: But I will say again that I am, and have been, impressed with the FAP. They CAN be very helpful.[/quote]

Some people live on one side of the law, while others stray over to the other side of it. For those of us on our side, housecat, the FAP are generally helpful.[/quote]
Sometimes fate intervenes and people wind up on the wrong side of the law because they were doing what they had to do to survive. I have found that to be true in Taiwan. As they say in Alladin, ‘Gotta eat to live. Gotta steal to eat.’

It’s easy to get on the wrong side of the law when it is convenient for the police for you to be there, even if whatever you have done (or haven’t done) is completely legal.

That being said, from a service point of view, the police here are very helpful. I remember leaving a whole bunch of expensive camera equipment by the side of a country road once, at two o’clock in the morning. I realised when I was about 3 hours away. I called the nearest police station and they went to fetch it for me, keeping it in a locked case until I could fetch it again.

I’ve worked on many matters with the foreign affairs police, and depending on the unit and their leaders, I’ve seen some incredibly good police work.

I realize that that the skills of being good at a foreign language may be entirely separate from the skills of being good at a police work, but I’ve been lucky to find a bunch of real pros – clean, hard-working, and willing to put in a lot of extra work in order to try to get a just result. Some examples:

  1. FAP officers straightened out an awful mistake by Da-An police after a friend’s passport was stolen right before his visa was about to expire. There was no way to get his home-country rep office here to issue a passport before the expiration date on the visa, so the immigration guys were going to toss him from the country and blacklist him as an overstay – not a good result for a guy running a company here. No country would take him without a passport, but it wasn’t his fault. The FAP guys went through the paperwork and found the key screwup by Da-An district police – the local station had never reported to the immigration folks that the passport had been stolen. Turns out that there are ways of dealing with exactly that problem, and the FAP guys saved the man his visa status and his company.

  2. FAP officers probably saved the life’s savings of an old foreign guy who’d fallen into the clutches of scam artists. I looked through some contracts and documents the guy had shown me, and I realized what a massive mess of computer-generated phony-baloney it was. The FAP guys collected info on the gang and took them apart.

  3. FAP officers pulled off a feat widely considered impossible – a few years ago, when a Spanish jeweler had some USD 6 million in massive diamonds belonging to other people stolen from him in Geneva by a Taiwanese woman, they managed to get every single diamond back some 17 days after the diamonds were stolen. Generally speaking the FBI considers it “impossible” to get diamonds back that have been gone for more than a few days – the difficulty of identifying them and the ability for huge diamonds to be recut so as to be absolutely unrecognizable are key factors. In many countries’ police forces, at least one or two (or maybe even all) of the diamonds would have disappeared into the pockets of the officers.

  4. FAP officers went straight into the gangster-filled WuFenPu wholesale clothing market and took about USD 1 million in fake clothes for one of my clients right before Chinese New Year a ways back – and then repeated the trick the next year. The FAP was completely professional, swamped the area with officers from both their unit and the organized crime unit, and they didn’t yield to pressure from any of the gangsters and legislative aides who came out to scream that all the stuff had to be released.

I know an FAP chief whose best memory of his decades of service was back in the 1980s when he managed to set free and repatriate a bunch of Thai woman who had been lured to Taiwan with the promise of office jobs – upon arrival, they’d been raped and forced to work as prostitutes. Kept as essentially slaves for years, they thought they had no way out and no way to ever get home. When his police unit went in, the women thought the police would subject them to more mistreatment, but they were crying with relief when they realized that they were being set free. This action held up the FAP officer’s promotions for a while, as the guys behind the whole sex-slave prostitution ring were connected – but to this day, he thinks it was worth every bit of the years of exile. His integrity carried him through somehow, and now he gets some very interesting projects.

Sure, if you’re facing an FAP officer on a charge against you, I can understand that you would want to be quite careful about anything you say and not to think of them as a friend. But if you’re on the victim side of things, there are some really hard-working, honest, dedicated FAP teams out there.

Stories like the ones above are the types of things I wanted to hear when I started this thread :bow: .