Was Chinese police officer justified in shooting man dead during scuffle?
Zhou Zunyou considers the public uproar over the death of a Chinese man in a rare case of gun use
There has been intense debate about the case of Xu Chunhe, an impoverished middle-aged man who was shot dead earlier this month in front of his elderly mother and three children at a railway station in Qingan county, Heilongjiang province, by railway policeman Li Lebin.
Shortly after the incident, railway police authorities said Xu had stopped passengers getting through a security gate and when Li intervened, he resisted forcefully and even tried to grab Li's gun before one shot was fired.
Given the lack of trust in the government, the incident immediately drew public ire. When, in the wake of Xu's death, Qingan's vice-mayor Dong Guosheng tried to show solidarity with Li, he became a victim of the so-called "human flesh search engine", a Chinese phenomenon of exposing official misdeeds through the joint efforts of social media users.
On May 14, the railway police authorities finally released some edited security camera footage, showing Xu, drunk and aggressive, in a violent confrontation with Li up until the shooting. Meanwhile, the authorities published an official internal investigation report, reaffirming their conclusion that the shooting was "justified".
The incident needs to be viewed against the backdrop of China's recent policy change regarding the use of police firearms. Before the gruesome knife attack at Kunming railway station in March 2014, Chinese police officers were legally authorised to use firearms in emergency situations. In practice, however, their firearms were kept in safe storage most of the time, due to the fact that gun-related crimes were rare and gun-control laws strict.
After the Kunming carnage, and also in view of the rise in terrorist activities, the Chinese government started to encourage on-duty police officers to carry and use guns to respond to violent incidents. Ordinary people overall welcome this policy turn in favour of enhanced security, but their trepidations regarding police gun misuse are not unfounded, because many police officers have received little training in the use of guns.
The ongoing discussions on the incident in Qingan point to the key question: Was the policeman justified in using deadly force? For an officer's action to be justified, it has to comply with both the principle of legality and the principle of reasonableness.
