Beijing: Police in China appear to be trying to improve their often harsh public image. One city is trying to do it with more fashionable red raincoats for their female traffic officers.
State media on Wednesday said the new raincoats made their debut Sunday in the heart of the huge southwestern city of Chongqing.
The makeover is one of the more colorful efforts police are making to reach out to a public long angry over corruption and abuse of power. It will take far more than surface changes, if cases in recent years are any indication: One Shanghai man who killed six policemen in a stabbing spree in 2008 drew widespread public sympathy with allegations that he lashed out to avenge torture in police custody.
Police are also reaching out to the public online. The state-run Xinhua News Agency on Tuesday reported at least 500 police bureaus in China have started communicating with the world's largest online population via social networking websites similar to Twitter, which is banned in China.
Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu told a national police conference last month that police should master the tool for better interaction and to hear complaints.
Some police bureaus are using the microblogs - the posting of brief messages online - to collect information to help solve crimes and to hold online conferences to hear public opinion.
Such efforts are one way to try to calm the tensions that lead to thousands of incidents of social unrest per year.
Police recently have also been accused of playing a key role in the network of so-called black jails, illegal detention centers to hold citizens who try to take grievances over corruption and other matters to central government officials in Beijing and other cities. A report by Southern Metropolis Daily last year said police would then escort the citizens back to their hometowns.
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