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Home >Expats Living in ShanghaiPolice gory video to alert the public about safe driving.
Update：2013-12-10 00:56 Views：
IT looks like an R-rated gruesome thriller - pedestrians being knocked over by racing vehicles, cars ramming into each other and crushing passengers inside.The 12-minute video, however, is no work of fiction but a compilation of surveillance camera footage. Traffic police in an eastern Chinese city posted it online to alert the public to the dangers of careless and reckless driving.
Posted on Tuesday, by yesterday morning the clip had received more than 4 million hits on Youku.com, the country's popular video-sharing site, and received both praise and condemnation.
China's roads remain the world's deadliest. According to the latest statistics released by the Ministry of Public Security, a total of 27,000 people were killed in 99,000 road accidents in the first half of 2010.
Tang Jiachun, a police official in Heze City, Shandong Province, said the city's traffic police compiled the footage of accidents on Heze's roads, most of which occurred in the second half of last year.
Tang said the video was to educate the public by alarming them. Part of the video had also been aired by the city's television channel.
"In the past, the public were unmoved if we just played the education CD," Tang said. "So we decided to be a bit more innovative by making a video of real scenes."
The police added subtitles to each of the scenes, identifying the time and place of each accident and explaining the causes. The preface of the video states: 99 percent of these accidents were caused by people violating traffic rules. Please cherish life and drive safely.
"It's absolutely brutal! But because of this it does alert the public," said an Internet user named Zisefengling.
"The police should have done this earlier to raise public awareness of traffic violations," said another web user, named Dalangtaosha.
But the initiative also drew criticism for not considering victims' privacy. "The police should get consent from the victims' families first," said an Internet user named Sinian. "They must feel sad revisiting the death scenes of their loved ones."
China's top legislature in February passed revisions to the Criminal Law, making drunk driving and speeding criminal offenses.
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