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June 24, 2017

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The uneasy and unpredictable life of a drug cop

THE killing of Jiaba Wuge, a 34-year-old policeman from Sichuan Province who was shot by a drug suspect last week, shocked the nation and brought the dangers faced by the cops to the forefront.

In Shanghai’s Hongkou District, there are 13 police officers in the narcotics division — the first full-time team set up in Shanghai in 1998 to deal with the menace of drugs.

The squad received an award from the Ministry of Public Security this year for their feats including busting a drug den in a remote mountain village in Guangdong Province and seized 2.4 tons of crystal meth in 2015.

“It’s a matter of pride,” says a police officer, who identified himself only as “H” to remain anonymous.

A large part of this team’s job involves staying in touch with their informers, most of them former offenders who had served prison time.

To make sure the informers don’t become “double agents,” W — H’s colleague and head of the squad — says the police test their loyalty while carefully nourishing their special relations.

Key players

“We try to help them with resources at our disposal so that they can live a normal life,” W says.

The informers are key players in what is legally approved of as “controlled delivery,” in which they take part in drug dealings with real drug dealers.

When the squad’s suspicion about the dealers is confirmed, it begins the arduous investigation to determine the scale of the network and identities of the suspects, often by tracking their phone calls and finding out how the drugs are transported.

While a drug dealer can make hundreds of calls with different phones and numbers every day, it usually takes a really skilled driver to track the suspects down driving hundreds of kilometers across the country.

Most drugs are brought to Shanghai by road, according to the police.

At the Hongkou drug squad, Z is known as the “god of driving” for his ability in following the drug dealers without being noticed. His suspects often drive high-speed luxury cars while he follows them in an average car.

“One time my colleague and I had to park our car on an expressway at night without the lights so that the suspects wouldn’t notice us, but there was the danger of some vehicles ramming into us from the back,” Z says.

The arrests come at a price in some cases.

In 2012, the year when Z joined the squad, he watched his colleague getting bruised at an interprovincial tollgate of an expressway.

The suspect they were chasing took a U-turn from a closed lane and hit a car parked on the way.

One of Z’s colleagues deliberately banged into the suspect’s car without giving a thought of forcing him to stop and surrender. In the process, he hurt his forehead on the windshield.

“There was no way to fire at the suspects because the shots and shells could have easily injured other drivers,” Z says.

Nowadays, the narc police have to deal with drug dealers who have learnt to stay out of the radar.

H said it now takes about 10 hours on an average to make an arrest, while previously it took just about an hour.

“Now payments are easily done online and drugs are delivered through mail without the physical presence of the drug dealer or the buyer,” he says. “An experienced drug dealer — if his suspicions are aroused — immediately ceases transaction.”

Only one woman police officer has served with the Hongkou squad because the job is considered too demanding for women to make long trips out of town and constantly work at night.

Away from the public eye

The drug squad members stay away from the public eye as much as possible to avoid posing any kind of danger to their family members. For this reason too they miss out on many important family gatherings.

H says nowadays over 100 drug suspects are arrested every year, but in most cases they get away with light punishments for not holding large amounts of drugs.

A drug user can be detained for up to 15 days, but a drug dealer involved in smuggling, selling, transporting and producing under 10 grams of heroin or crystal meth or other drugs can be sentenced to up to three years in prison, according to Chinese law.

“I will kill you when I get out,” H remembers a suspect telling him during interrogation.

He has told his daughter, who is graduating from university this year, not to tell anybody what her father does as a policeman.

W, who started to work with the squad in September last year, says he had to ask his son’s kindergarten to remove their family picture from the wall.

“I avoid discussing work with my family in case they worry about me. Working overtime is all I tell them,” he says.

W wishes that the drug squad ceases to exist some day, but the battle against the drugs is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

“Old habits, bad friends, destitution and high profits from the drug business are what drags a person down this business time and time again,” he says.




 

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