BEIJING - The police and procurator in Southwest China's Chongqing municipality are going online to collect real-time crime and corruption clues and to make friends in cyberspace.
"Netizens have dubbed it 'discussing politics online, fighting corruption online and observing public opinion'," Legal Daily cited a local procuratorate official as saying on Sunday.
The official said that a mechanism to collect, monitor, analyze and process public opinions online has been running effectively since last year, and the procurator's ID was registered on the Internet forum Tianya to better "interact" with netizens.
A rotating team of officials log in as "Chongqing procurator" to collect information and give feedback. "This aims to interact better with netizens", the official said.
As of Sunday the "Chongqing Procurator", which was registered on May 19, had replied 20 times to a range of topics covering corruption or crime reports.
An even more active official representative was the "Chongqing Web police", which was registered on Tianya on March 25 and had commented 135 times and posted new topics 13 times by Sunday afternoon.
According to the Web police's posting at 00:32 on May 11, a netizen claiming a day earlier to be a Chongqing version of Zhen Minsheng - the man who attacked and killed schoolchildren in Nanping, Fujian Province in March - was detained by police on May 10.
A history of the police ID showed that it was fast to respond to any potential threats found online even out of working hours.
The Web police also proactively feed the public feature stories and the latest news relating to the police.
The Web police attracted about 698 "guests" on the Tianya forum and received a mixed reaction. Many netizens praised it and said they followed its postings.
"Chongqing police have the backing of local people", one comment said.
However, others expressed concerns about the Web police intruding on online freedom and overreacting to netizens' joke or complaints.
But the administrator of the Tianya forum said the two IDs are not authorized to delete or block netizen's comments.
CHINA DAILY
(China Daily 05/31/2010 page5)