Gangs targeted as National Day nears
- Source: Global Times
- [07:14 August 18 2009]
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By Lin Meilian
Police in Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality arrested 1,544 gang members in a wide crackdown on 14 gangs said to be operating under a “protective umbrella” offered by high-ranking officials and businessmen, the Chongqing Evening News reported yesterday.
During a two-month campaign from June through July, those arrested included 19 gang bosses and 100 other key gang members, and confiscated 48 guns and 877 bullets, the report said, adding that 469 gangsters remained at large.
“The wings of gangsters range from common people to police, businessmen and senior officials, which poses a threat to the safety of society,” Liu Guanglei, secretary of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Politics and Law Committee and head of the campaign targeting gangsters, told the newspaper.
Similar campaigns are taking place across the country in an effort to ensure the security for the 60th anniversary of National Day in October.
No one from the Chongqing Public Security Bureau was available for comment yesterday.
Chongqing, home to more than 30 million people, utilized more than 3,000 police officers in its crackdown.
Three billionaires were among the biggest arrests, the Xinhua News Agency has said.
The campaign came just days after Wen Qiang, the former deputy police chief and director of the Chongqing Justice Bureau, was put under investigation for an alleged connection with gangs.
The downfall of one of the city’s high-ranking officials made headlines all over the country and fueled people’s anger toward senior officials’ relations with gangsters.
“It’s not easy to crack down on the gangsters because they have a protective umbrella offered by senior officials,” Chen Tianben, a professor of public security at the Chinese People’s Public Security University, told the Global Times yesterday.
Chen said some senior officials provide the “fertile” soil for gangs to grow and develop, which hinders police efforts in breaking them up.
“Moreover, the whole campaign is a selective action, which means the police launch the campaign whenever they want,” he added.
Still, many hailed the campaign as a move to clip the gangsters’ wings.
Xie Juan, a Chongqing resident who works at an IT company, told the Global Times yesterday that gangs are a nationwide problem, while the fall of gangsters in Chongqing is only the tip of the iceberg.
“We all know the gangsters have protection, so we try not to offend them,” she said.
Police across China investigated more than 8,923 gang crimes and arrested more than 43,779 people between 2006 and 2009, the Procuratorial Daily has reported.
