In a public cemetery near the intersection of Tainan’s Taijiang Boulevard and Beishanwei 3rd Road on Aug. 22, two police officers, Tu Ming-cheng (凃明誠), 36, and Tsao Jui-chieh (曹瑞傑), 27, were stabbed to death by wanted fugitive Lin Hsin-wu (林信吾) while searching for a stolen scooter.
Lin, a prisoner on the loose from Mingde Minimum Security Prison after having absconded from day release on Aug. 14, stabbed Tu with a switchblade, prompting the police officer to fight back by deploying pepper spray. Tu was stabbed a total of 17 times during the fatal encounter.
The unarmed Tsao, who arrived at the scene later in a police car, was stabbed 38 times when he exited the vehicle after Lin, now in possession of Tu’s gun, fired six shots at Tsao’s car.
Why had Tu not shot first?
The lethal force debate
In the ensuing public post-mortem, how a knife-wielding Lin managed to disarm and murder Tu and Tsao despite being confronted by a police officer carrying a gun drew particular attention from Taiwan’s government.
In its first session after the summer recess, the Legislature passed revised draft amendments to the Act Governing the Use of Police Weapons on Sept. 30, introducing further provisions on when police may “shoot directly” without first firing a warning shot.
The amendments, which made into law existing internal police guidelines, were first mooted in the wake of public outrage over the killing of 24-year-old railway police officer Lee Cheng-han (李承翰) by a disgruntled train passenger at Chiayi Station in 2019.
Hsu Fu-shen (許福生), a Central Police University Department of Administration Police professor, told CNA that officers were often intimidated by the thought of shooting directly at suspects under existing provisions.
By codifying the guidelines published by the National Police Agency (NPA) in 2016, Hsu said officers would no longer hesitate to use their weapons in life-or-death situations.
According to Hsu, this extra layer of legal protection would help reduce the chances of police officers being convicted or receiving disproportionate penalties due to flawed judgments.
NPA chief Huang Ming-chao (黃明昭) also backed the law amendment, saying it now makes it clear to both the police and public when lethal force may be used.
However, Hsiao Jen-hao (蕭仁豪), a serving police officer and standing director at the Taiwan Association for Advancing Police Rights, believes that making the guidelines into law puts officers in more, not less, legal jeopardy.
With the specific scenarios in which police can skip a warning shot and fire directly at suspects now legally defined, courts will have limited room for interpretation when reviewing officers’ use of firearms, he told CNA.
“The amendment laid down situations where officers ‘may’ fire their guns directly, so does that mean we may no longer fire directly in other situations?”
He said the only thing the amendment had achieved was to highlight the NPA’s incompetence in educating officers about the guidelines over the past six years.
Alex Weng (翁偉仁), a lawyer and former prosecutor, said making the guidelines law could cloud officers’ judgment on whether to fire their guns in dangerous situations involving suspects.
“By the time they have gone over all the legal requirements in their heads, the suspects will have already gotten away,” he said.
According to Weng, the NPA has missed the point by including the four scenarios, which does not help to reassure police officers deciding whether to fire their guns.
“It is a fallacy that police officers are afraid to use their guns. They’re afraid of the potential legal consequences,” he said.
Weng said the amendments, which he described as an “empty gesture” in their current form, should be reworded to grant officers using justified lethal force immunity from lawsuits, or at the very least free legal counseling and full subsidization of legal fees.
Despite the criticism, the Ministry of the Interior argued that the amended law would shield police officers from the burden of lawsuits because it now stipulates that state compensation shall first be sought in cases where police officers are accused of violating the rules of using police weapons and infringing on the rights of the people.
The ministry has noted that giving precedence to state compensation would spare officers from having to immediately face litigation, though this does not mean officers are now immune from criminal lawsuits, and people may still file a civil suit against officers should negotiations over the amount of state compensation fail.
Training and manpower
For Hsiao, insufficient manpower and a lack of proper training are more at fault in the deaths of Tu and Tsao than legal questions surrounding the use of force.
Hsiao said that officers often underestimated the danger of confronting suspects without proper backup, just as Tu did when he faced Lin.
Moreover, Hsiao said the fact that Tsao was on traffic-related duties when asked to be Tu’s backup pointed to a labor shortage in the local police force.
As of August 2019, Tainan’s officer-to-resident ratio ranked the fifth highest among Taiwan’s 22 administrative regions at one officer to 461 inhabitants, after New Taipei (530), Taoyuan (517), Hsinchu County (514), and Hsinchu City (466), according to the latest statistics released by the Ministry of the Interior.
With collective wisdom “sorely lacking” in Taiwan’s law enforcement sector, Hsiao said the NPA should compile a reference similar to the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Data Collection.
According to Hsiao, such a database would help officers form better judgments in potentially life-threatening situations.
In addition, he said, officers could benefit from augmented-reality immersive police training systems capable of simulating a wide range of situations.
Hsiao said the systems, which some local police forces have already acquired, would better prepare officers for tense situations requiring them to make split-second decisions.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel