Study On Abuse Of Police Power And Its Regulating

In a country under the rule of law, police power should be strictly limited by law,and the level of limit embodies the legal governance degree of that country. The actualutilization of police power in society largely signifies the development of social legalcivilization. Some scholars hold that police power is inversely proportional to civilrights under certain restrictions; increase of police power means decrease of civil rights,and abuse of police power often makes civil rights come to naught.[1]The police power,whether for maintaining national security and good social order or for preventing andprohibiting criminal activities and punishing criminals, has the ultimate purpose ofensuring human rights. If this purpose is not achieved, exercising of police power willlose the ground of its functioning and evolve into abuse of police power, which willdirectly result in infringement of citizens’ personal, property and life interests, damageto dignity of national laws and authority of police organs, as well as impairment ofimage of police organs and policemen.This paper firstly analyzes the concept of police power, and based on its definitionand examples, indicates that police power is the administration right and criminalinvestigation right of all the police authorities and policemen of the State becausepolice power is mainly exercised by public security departments. The police powermentioned herein mainly refers to the security administration right and criminalinvestigation right of public security departments. Analysis of characteristics of policepower is made in the aspects of origin, purpose and means. The six characteristics (i.e.political, administrative, legal, compulsory, public and obligatory) of police power areclosely related to abuse of police power. For regulating abuse of police power in themost wide and in-depth manner, abuse of police power is defined as all the actions ofpublic security departments and policemen to illegally exercise power, i.e. the actionsother than legally exercising power are all illegal. And then this paper classifies abuse of police power into specific types, including abuse of power in administrative lawenforcement field and criminal law enforcement field, self-seeking abuse of power andnon-self-seeking abuse of power, abuse of power by individual and abuse of power bycollective. In this paper, the harms of abuse of police power are expounded, mainlyincluding damage to civil rights, legal sanctity and police power. This paper alsosummarizes the current status of abuse of police power in China. The primarymanifestation of abuse of police power is law enforcement with infringing humanrights, disregarding law or worshipping violence. This paper points out the economiccause, political cause, legal cause and cultural cause of abuse of police power, amongwhich the legal cause is explained in details. The main reason is unreasonablecollocation of powers, which leads to coexisting of excessive power and insufficientpower. Two major ways of regulating abuse of police power in China are proposed: thefirst is to establish correct law enforcing concept, including the concepts of ensuringhuman rights and rule of law; the second is to improve control mechanism ofcollocation and exercising of police power, including internal power controlmechanism and external power control mechanism.