Also, Chinese police are overworked (China is extremely under policed ironically enough) and so tend to focus on seemingly easy but impractical solutions to fighting crime.
And with taxi-hailing apps' commence, this is becoming really rare since the driver can easily pin-pointed (by cross-referencing ubiquitous street cams). Actually in this case the murderer got arrested soon afterwards.
While I agree China is under policed, they are generally more effective in body offenses and thanks to street cams (again). These years even home break-ins are rare. As who lived in SF for a year, it's definitely better than SFPD.
Ride sharing and taxi hailing apps have definitely made taking a taxi mug safer. Conserving how didi has replace black cabs, that is definitely a good thing. I’m not sure why the government wants didi to shutdown its ride sharing business rather than rely on it as a sure fire way of at least solving murders after the fact. Even full background checks won’t solve murders 100%, and knowing you’ll get caught is a great deterrent.
Property crimes are still a huge problem in China, there is a reason all 2nd tier apartments are still barred like crazy. Chinese police don’t really care, they are not using the CCTVs to actually fight property crime, rather for other things.
You finally mention it. Without the government wanting it, this story wouldn't have broken. It seems like the c. gov could easily hide hundreds of murders.
The "heard of often" just means it gets plastered on the news / social media when it does happen.
If it could have been prevented, it is the right reaction.
Besides, this is how China works most of the time. Pressure (boycot) on companies leads to results... or put them out of (nearly) business.
Most famously this leads Japanese departments to label difficult murder cases as suicides.
Perhaps suggesting that the Japanese need more guns to be polite wasn't the best example. Japan is already one of the most (the most?) polite society in the world - at least talking about how strangers interact.
*An armed society of rational people is a polite society. And people tend to slip in and out of a rational state depending on their emotions, pride, sobriety, etc.
Example: anthropologists believe that on the whole, more polite societies typically murder each other at a higher rate than less polite societies.
"Polite" just means "in keeping with cultural norms". If it's polite to deal with disagreements, injuries and insults by pulling a gun, that's still polite but I certainly wouldn't feel safe.
If you believe that, you've never lived in Atlanta (or Japan for that matter).
I’m actually writing this from Didi at the moment. It’s quite irrational to overhype these didi-murders since China is a country of about 1.4 billion people and statistically these incidents are pretty much meaningless. I guess it’s same kind of irrationality like in the west, when people try to come up with problems about Uber that have always existed in other contextes.
1. another customer reported the murder a day before for harassment, Didi refused to look into the case
2. when the victim's family & friends reach out to Didi after receiving messages from the victim asking for help, Didi refused to do anything other than asking them to wait.
3. when the victim's family & friends reported the incident to the police, the police immediately contacted Didi but again Didi refused to provide any help.