Recently, the Crime Research Center and the Department of Criminology of National Chung Cheng University (CCU) conducted some survey research on Taiwanese people’s satisfaction of justice and crime prevention in 2022 over the telephone; furthermore, the survey results would be announced in the presentation "Research of Survey of Taiwanese People’s Satisfaction of Justice and Crime Prevention - 2022" at CCU Taipei Representative Office on February 13th. According to the survey, aside from continuing to give positive affirmation to the police officers’ effort for protecting the public and maintaining law order, as many as 90% of the respondents agreed with imposing the death penalty on cop killers, which shows that the recent cases of killing police officers in Taiwan have caused panic among the public.

 

Based on CCU’s "Research of Survey of Taiwanese People’s Satisfaction of Justice and Crime Prevention – 2022," in terms of "perceptions of residence and community security conditions,” the satisfaction rate remains at over 80% from last year, with 83.1% of the respondents considering the security situation near their homes to be good; however, in the aspect of "overall satisfaction with public security," the satisfaction rate drops slightly, with 60.5% of the respondents giving negative ratings. On the other hand, as for the public's satisfaction with "police maintenance of public safety," 73.1% of the respondents expressed satisfaction, although the degree remains above 70% from last year, it is declining slightly year by year after 2019, indicating the government still needs to keep pushing and performing more actively.

 

Moreover, 54.3% of the respondents gave negative reviews on the various measures taken by the government to reinforce the social safety net. According to the Crime Research Center, "it is obvious that there is still room for improvement in various related measures, which means the government still needs to continue strengthening the overall social safety net." While concerning "the impartiality of judgment," only 32.8% of the respondents believed that judges could judge criminal cases with justice and equity. Although there wasn’t much difference compared with last year's survey results, we can find that the respondents still hold relatively higher negative evaluations.

 

Regarding the performance of the government in anti-drug and fraud prevention, according to the survey results, 55.3% of the respondents affirmed the attention and effort on anti-drug which government agencies, police and judicial units have invested. However, due to the frequent occurrence of fraud cases recently, 53.3% of the respondents held a negative attitude towards the performance of the government's fraud prevention and punishment, and the rate has been dropping year by year. In terms of the decriminalization of cannabis, the CCU Crime Research Center pointed out that about 61.2% of the respondents completely disapprove of the decriminalization of cannabis, and 22.4% of the respondents basically do not agree with the decriminalization of cannabis, which means only if there are other complementary measures for the decriminalization, they are willing to chew over. In sum, people who opposed the decriminalization of cannabis is as much as 83.6% of the respondents.

 

In view of the murders of police officers in Taiwan in recent years, the CCU Crime Research Center specially added a new survey question for the public’s opinion on the "death penalty for the deliberate murder of police officers." The results show that as many as 90.5% of the respondents agree that the death penalty should be imposed on the intentional killing of police officers; moreover, 55.0% of them "strongly agree with the death penalty." As a result, we can observe that cases of killing police officers in Taiwan in recent years have stirred up the agitation.

 

Regarding the issue of the abolition of the death penalty, the CCU Crime Research Center stated that there are 62.1% of the respondents completely disagree with the abolition of the death penalty, which shows a noticeable increase by compared with the rate of 45.9% of the same issue in 2022; the proportion of the interviewees who "basically do not support the abolition of the death penalty, but are willing to consider if there are complementary measures" decreased from 34.4% in 2022 to 25.7% in 2023. According to the result, there are 87.8% of the respondents currently oppose the abolition of the death penalty, but it is not ruled out that there will be some changes when the relevant complementary measures are launched in the future.

 

According to the CCU Crime Research Center, the convener was Shu-Lung Yang, the Professor of the CCU Department of Criminology and the Director of CCU Crime Research Center, and the following vice conveners include Jui-Lung Cheng, the Professor of the CCU Department of Criminology and the Dean of the CCU College of Education, Hua-Fu Hsu, the Professor of CCU Department of Criminology and the Dean of the International Affairs, Yueh-Chung Ma, the Professor(chair) of CCU Department of Criminology; all of them had completed interviews with 1,806 people in Taiwan from January 13th to 16th, 2023, with a confidence level of 95%, the maximum sampling error is at ±2.2%.