Henan scraps case-related police rankings

Police in central China's Henan Province have abolished a system that ranked units based on cases solved as it was thought to pressure them to come up with results through improper methods such as interrogation by torture, said a local police officer on Thursday.

There will be no rankings among public security bureaus regarding the numbers of solved cases, or arrested and prosecuted suspects, according to a 10-point document issued by the Public Security Department of Henan to improve criminal law enforcement work.

The public's feedback on the new appraisal system will prompt police to work hard to handle cases, said Hua Liebing, a senior officer of the department.

Simultaneous recording and filming will be carried out in interrogation of all criminal cases, added the document, which was adopted in late October.

The moves will help ensure police do not interrogate suspects using torture or handle cases unjustly or falsely under pressure from pre-set targets on solved cases and time limits to crack cases, said Hua.

In 2004, Henan began to include the case solution rate as one of the means of examining police performance, as the province stressed the principle that a case involving deaths must be cracked.

Following the rankings' introduction, the rate of cracked cases involving deaths increased from 60 percent before 2004 to 96 percent in 2007 in Henan. But it also led to some wrongful arrests and convictions.

In one of the country's most notorious mishandled cases, Zhao Zuohai, a farmer in Henan, was released in 2010 after serving 11 years in jail over a conviction for homicide. The man he was alleged to have murdered turned up alive. Zhao said the police tortured him into making a confession.