Police answer call in record time

Ever-ready Zhangzhou city unit responds with incredible speed to help the public, Wang Ru reports.

When police officer Guo Shaoxiang worked in the public security bureau of Xiangcheng district, Zhangzhou city, Fujian province, in 1990, he found that since the establishment of the hotline 110 in 1985, it was dialed just 22 times in the previous five years. This seemed a clear case of underreporting. For instance, just in May of that year, 27 robberies occurred in the district.

To make better use of the hotline, Guo applied to move it from the duty room to the patrol police's office, so that they could quickly arrive at a scene and have a better chance to solve problems. He also spent his own money taking out advertisements about 110, a designated emergency number, in the local TV station.

"At that time, the patrol police only patrolled. And 110 operators only answered the phone, transferred people's requests to the concerned departments, and waited for the department to handle it. This, of course, was time-consuming. The parts were totally separated, and we took the initiative to combine them, and make patrol police reach crime scenes to deal with people's problems as soon as they received the calls," says policeman Huang Haiqiang.