The Performance Evaluation System and the Culture of Fabrication

Following recent news reports about Ko Ch'i-nung, a criminal investigation squad leader in Nantou County, colluding with gangs and planting firearms to claim credit, one cannot help but sigh: another police officer "fallen in the line of duty" while striving for performance metrics. Was it to meet the performance evaluation requirements of permissions? To secure higher points for promotion? Or for lucrative case-solving bonuses? Is this an isolated incident or the product of a complicit structure? Have superiors really been oblivious to frontline officers long engaging in gun crackdowns, harboring weapons, and planting evidence to meet metrics? Or have they simply turned a blind eye out of mutual convenience?

Senior police officials once privately calculated that the probability of those with "outstanding performance" who were elected as "model police officers" later experiencing disciplinary and integrity issues ranks the highest among all police officers. This is a very ironic phenomenon, and the problems hidden within it were not formed overnight.

The crux of the problem lies in the toxic "culture of fabrication" caused by the police force's long-distorted performance evaluation system. Admittedly, a "culture of fabrication" exists in any public or private institution, but the police agency pushes this culture of fabrication to its absolute extreme, leaving people astounded. To the police, the culture of fabrication is like a drug addict taking narcotics; once infected, they sink deep into the quagmire and cannot extricate themselves. From public security statistics to survey data on public satisfaction with law enforcement, as long as former government heads and senior police officials published data of questionable authenticity, their successors have had no choice but to use those previous fabrications as a standard and continue fabricating downwards.

-+

Furthermore, special project performance systems designed entirely to highlight high-level public security achievements—such as zero crime growth, anti-drug, anti-gun, anti-theft, "three-in-one," "four-in-one," "five-in-one," Organized Crime Suppression, Thunder Special Operations, expanded random inspections, simultaneous gang crackdowns, and Chinese New Year security operations—are all duties that successors are compelled to pursue and inherit from their predecessors. Indeed, to showcase their own uniqueness, they even create various bizarre projects. Our superiors always approach public security issues with a short-sighted mindset (since they only serve for two or three years), much like an addict taking drugs for temporary relief. Faced with a relentless succession of project-based duties, frontline colleagues are exhausted and can only cope, muddle through, and fabricate. As the saying goes, "there are policies above, and countermeasures below." Absurd farces such as covering up cases, torture, and fabricated data are staged one after another. The true effect is form over substance, and propaganda over results.

The problems of false data and case suppression are already common knowledge. Nourished by a culture of fabrication, police officers with strong case-solving abilities but weak self-restraint care only about performance without questioning their methods, leading to one illegal and undisciplined act after another. Seeing the tacit acquiescence and turning a blind eye of their superiors, rogue police officers feel no sense of guilt as they continue to break the law and commit offenses. Analyzing the causes of individual cases with an understanding of the above conditions may lead to a different realization. The toxic harm caused by the performance evaluation system is profound. While the JRF and the Taiwan Association for Police Reform have sought various avenues of reform, hoping to eradicate the performance fabrication culture through external supervision, they often feel a sense of powerlessness when facing the police department's drug-like addiction to performance metrics. Only when the police force honestly confronts the culture of fabrication can it correct the malpractices generated by the performance system.

※ Published in: China Times