Joint traffic police work at ‘border areas’

SHANGHAI traffic police have started to work together to enforce the law against traffic offenders at busy junctions and streets located on borders of two or more districts.

By working together at the same spot, police officers from different districts are now more efficient in dealing with traffic offenders who used to escape from them by “going onto the other side,” police said.

Downtown Huangpu and Xuhui districts are divided by Shaanxi Road S. at its intersection with Nanchang Road. While the west part of Nanchang Road is located in Xuhui District, the east part of the road and the intersection are in Huangpu.

Xu Bin, a police officer of the No.7 traffic police squad of Huangpu District which administers the intersection, said jaywalking and e-bike riders riding on the wrong side of the street are the most frequent traffic offenses here.

If an offender moves to the other side, Xu said he and his colleagues can’t “cross the border” to catch and punish them as they are restricted by the rules of their job.

“In this case we’ll have to report to our supervisors for them to contact our colleagues of the other district,” he said. “Before our colleagues arrive, the offender will have fled already.”

For this reason, some “border areas” became “blind spots” for traffic law enforcement, the traffic police admitted.

For the past one month, however, police from both districts jointly patrolled during the morning and evening rush hours at this intersection, and also set up road blocks once or twice every week.

“When a cross-district traffic accident happens, for example, we can work with our Xuhui colleagues on the site to deal with it immediately,” Xu said.