Police System Reform

Problems with the Police System

Police reform is an important but difficult judicial reform issue. As the first link in the chain of criminal justice, well-trained police officers and high-quality law enforcement reduce the burden and many of the problems that arise later in the process, while ensuring that human rights are fully protected. However, an organizational culture that ignores the voices of rank-and-file officers has long kept Taiwan's policing policy from being grounded in practical reality or reflecting the problems officers face on the front line. As a result, rank-and-file officers are run off their feet and widely overworked. At the same time, Taiwan's police system is entangled with legacies of the authoritarian era, political maneuvering, an insular organization and culture, and the difficult balance between security and human rights, all of which make reform hard to achieve.

Past Reform Efforts

In 2004, JRF joined the Police Reform Association, the Taiwan Bar Association, the Taipei Bar Association, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the Prosecutors Reform Association, the Awakening Foundation, the Taipei Society, the Taiwan Law Society, the Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association, and the Gender/Sexuality Rights Association Taiwan in forming the Police Reform Alliance. In 2005, the Alliance called on the police to respect the rights of criminal suspects and to stop the practice of refusing to register crime reports, and met with the Minister of the Interior to press these demands. Subsequent reform efforts, however, lost momentum.

In 1999, JRF had sought to make the investigative practices of the police and other investigative agencies a key focus of reform, along three main lines:

1. Reforms to criminal procedure, including strengthening prosecutors' oversight of police investigations, establishing standard procedures for eyewitness identification, requiring full audio and video recording of interrogations, and strengthening the role of lawyers in advising and accompanying suspects during police questioning. This has long been a core focus of JRF's work; see the "Criminal Procedure Reform" page on our website for details.
2. Strengthening the use of science in investigations, which later led to JRF's push to reform the forensic expert system; see the "Forensic Science System Reform" page on our website.
3. The enactment of the Police Power Exercise Act. Although this line of work was not sustained, it achieved concrete results in 2003. In 1999, JRF began drafting a bill based on a draft Police Power Exercise Act prepared by Professor Li Chen-shan, and the draft was largely complete by the end of 2000. The opportunity to legislate came at the end of 2001, when the Constitutional Court (then the Council of Grand Justices) issued J.Y. Interpretation No. 535, which found that the law lacked clear provisions on the requirements, procedures, and remedies for police stops and checks, and called for such rules to be enacted promptly. On May 13, 2002, JRF, the Police Reform Association, and Legislators Chiu Tai-san, Chen Chi-mai, Li Yung-ping, and Chiu Chuang-chin held a joint press conference to release the civil society draft of the Police Power Exercise Act and urge the Legislative Yuan to pass it quickly. The Act was passed in 2003.

Current Reform Priorities

During the 2017 National Congress on Judicial Reform convened by the Presidential Office, JRF worked with the Taiwan Police Labor Rights Association and other groups to launch a new wave of police reform. The discussions focused on police education and police performance evaluation, with the aim of addressing the deep-rooted problems of a police system that places excessive emphasis on obedience to superiors and leaves little room for frontline perspectives. In response to a performance system that lacked any scientific basis and ignored the voices of rank-and-file officers, the Congress resolved to establish a diverse, transparent, evidence-based Police Performance Management Committee open to participation by rank-and-file officers.

Building on this, JRF seeks to gather the views of rank-and-file officers and will continue to press the Ministry of the Interior and local governments to carry out police reform along the following lines:

1. Respect the labor rights of rank-and-file officers, cut back excessive non-policing duties, and let police work return to its professional core.
2. Set performance requirements through an evidence-based process that draws on diverse views, gives rank-and-file officers a greater voice, and includes outside experts.
3. Liability arising from police duties (such as the use of police weapons and equipment) must be borne by the agency, not by individual officers.

To achieve these reforms, JRF urgently needs serving police officers to tell us about the realities of frontline law enforcement. Concrete problems that officers encounter will allow us to demand a direct response from the Ministry of the Interior and to bring them to the attention of the Control Yuan and the Legislative Yuan. Beyond the priorities above, we also welcome cases, suggestions, and concerns of every kind from serving officers, so that together we can improve the law enforcement environment and better protect the rights of the public.