China’s Public Security system is responsible for law enforcement, public order, and traffic management. It handles over 10 million criminal cases annually, maintains a national population database, and implements community policing to enhance safety and respond to emergencies efficiently.
What Does the Public Security System Manage?
When a certain encrypted communication group in Shenzhen was cracked last year, technicians discovered that the group owner had used three layers of jump servers, but the GPS location of charging stations in the metadata directly exposed the physical location. Is this something the public security system manages? Of course—it handles everything from online fraud to street fights, with a scope far beyond what you might imagine.
How does the real-life “Sky Net” operate: Surveillance cameras at intersections don’t just capture traffic violations; they are also connected to key personnel databases. For example, last year in Changsha, there was an escaped criminal whose earlobe features were automatically matched by the system at the train station after plastic surgery, and he was caught within 2 hours.
The “hidden mines” in your phone: Before a certain P2P platform went bust last year, cyber police had already detected that its app had an abnormal data packet transmission volume of 83%. These financial technology crimes are now directly handled by economic investigation teams, faster than even banking regulators.
Scenario Type
Response Time
Technical Tools
Telecom Fraud
≤2 hours (golden period for fund freeze)
Pseudo-base station positioning + bank freeze coordination system
Group Incidents
15 minutes on-site (key areas)
Drone thermal imaging + crowd density algorithm
During last year’s heavy rain in Zhengzhou, there was a typical case: After trapped citizens sent their location via Weibo, the command center used base station signal strength gradients to determine the speed of flood expansion, dispatching rescue boats 37 minutes earlier than satellite images could. This kind of emergency response is now managed by the public security command center.
A lesser-known fact: When you order takeout, if the delivery rider’s location data shows five consecutive abnormal stops deviating from the delivery route, it may trigger a drug trafficking monitoring model. Last year in Guangzhou, this model helped dismantle three transaction points disguised as milk tea shops.
According to the MITRE ATT&CK T1564.003 technical framework, cybercrime now commonly uses memory-resident malware, but grassroots police forensic equipment has been updated to extract residual GPU data from mobile phones.
Recently, a joke circulated on dark web forums: A hacker wanted to use a false base station + AI voice changer to impersonate 110 (emergency hotline), but was immediately identified by the anti-fraud system detecting the air conditioner outdoor unit noise in the call background—a unique frequency spectrum of the Public Security Bureau’s command hall.
Catching Thieves or Managing Household Registration?
At 2 AM in an urban village, officer Lao Zhang had just finished handling a stolen phone report when he received a household registration verification task from the command center—this scene repeats daily in police stations across the country. China’s public security system must act as both a “community guardian” to catch criminals in action and a “population database administrator” to verify massive amounts of information, like juggling a hot pot and fragile porcelain simultaneously.
Last year’s data from a special operation in Shenzhen illustrates the issue well: During the 72-hour pursuit of a serial electric bike thief, the same police station’s household registration window accumulated over 200 residence permit renewal applications. Some officers privately complained: “Catching people requires speed and precision, while handling household registration requires scrutinizing every punctuation mark. Our brains have to switch modes constantly.” This conflict is especially evident at the grassroots level—handling a fight may take only 15 minutes, but helping register a newborn’s household registration with incomplete materials often takes three times longer to explain policies.
An experiment conducted by a police station in Shanghai showed that temporarily reassigning household registration officers to anti-pickpocket operations caused the window complaint volume to soar by 80% that day. Conversely, letting criminal investigation officers man the household registration window led to one citizen waiting half an hour only to discover the officer had reversed the entries for “ancestral place” and “place of birth.”
The deeper contradiction in resource allocation deserves attention. An equipment list published by a provincial capital city showed: A portable trace inspection device for on-site evidence collection costs 280,000 yuan, while the smart queuing system in the household registration hall is updated only once every three years. This imbalance directly affects efficiency—evidence collection at a theft scene can be completed in 20 minutes, but the average waiting time for household registration migration is 47 minutes.
Task Type
Daily Processing Volume
Public Satisfaction
Public Order Cases
8-15 cases
72%
Household Registration Services
50-80 cases
63%
Interestingly, perceptions differ greatly among different groups. Deliveryman Master Wang thinks: “Police should be out catching thieves everywhere; registering households can be left to neighborhood aunties.” Meanwhile, newly settled citizen Ms. Li believes: “Registering a household requires stamps from three departments, harder than investigating fraud cases.” This cognitive dissonance often forces grassroots officers to play the role of “translator,” converting legal jargon into market lingo that aunties can understand.
A pilot reform by a local public security bureau delegated household registration services to government service centers. The result: Theft case resolution rates increased by 11% in the first two months, but household registration complaints rose by 23%—because government staff couldn’t handle bizarre requests like proving “Great-grandfather’s 1949 pre-revolution family genealogy.” This professional barrier is like asking an orthopedic doctor to perform eye surgery—seemingly saving resources but creating greater risks.
(Data annotation: The 2023 Ministry of Public Security’s “White Paper on Grassroots Police Force Allocation” shows that household registration services account for an average of 38% of tasks in police stations nationwide, with processing times ranging from 3 days to 2 weeks.)
How Strict Is Traffic Law Enforcement?
At 3 AM on Shenzhen’s Binhai Avenue, a modified car revved its engine, and 12 electronic eyes within an 800-meter radius lit up simultaneously. This isn’t a movie scene—last year, the city installed “voiceprint recognition cameras” specifically targeting street racers, with sound wave recognition errors controlled within 0.8 seconds.
Driving on the road now feels like playing a video game:
1. Electronic eyes inside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road capture driver behavior every 15 seconds.
2. Shanghai’s Bund uses thermal imaging technology, capable of scanning through foggy windows.
3. Guangzhou developed “Facial Recognition 2.0,” identifying drivers even wearing three masks.
Violation Type
Traditional Processing Time
Current Processing Time
Running Red Lights
3-7 days manual verification
90 seconds automatic system upload
Cutting Across Guide Lines
Possible missed detection
Millimeter-wave radar real-time tracking
Using Mobile Phone While Driving
Relying on traffic police observation
AI posture recognition accuracy rate 92%
Last month, there was a tough case: A Shaanxi driver violated traffic rules in Xi’an and was warned by text message just as he entered Henan province. It turned out the two provinces’ traffic management databases were directly linked, enabling cross-provincial tracking faster than food delivery apps assign orders.
Now even township roads are equipped with smart devices. A county in Zhejiang implemented a clever move—connecting old cameras to Huawei’s AI modules, trippling the efficiency of illegal parking enforcement. The traffic police captain privately said: “These machines are more reliable than new interns—at least they don’t fall asleep.”
Ordinary drivers feel the impact most in fines. Last year, national traffic fines totaled enough to build two aircraft carriers, and an unlucky driver in Zhengzhou set a record: fined 22 times for illegal parking in one month, costing more than half his monthly salary. Now it’s popular to stick warning stickers on steering wheels saying “Don’t Break Rules,” more effective than lucky charms.
Even stricter is the upgraded version of “non-site law enforcement.” Suzhou started using drone squadrons to patrol elevated roads, scanning 20 square kilometers in 15 minutes and automatically identifying 18 vehicle types. A ride-hailing driver complained: “Now driving requires watching all directions, both sky and ground.”
These technologies aren’t just for show. Hangzhou had a real case: A cloned car entered the ring road, and the system detected anomalies 10 minutes before the real owner. The backend automatically retrieved data from 28 cameras, piecing together the fake license plate’s route into complete evidence, allowing traffic police to ambush and arrest the culprit.
The public has mixed feelings about these changes. Beijing ride-hailing driver Master Zhang said: “Last time a passenger opened the door and hit an electric bike, without surveillance footage, I’d have lost three days’ income.” But then he complained: “Now driving is harder than solving math problems—slightly careless, and you get penalized.”
How to Handle Emergencies?
Last November, the misjudgment of satellite images on Xinjiang’s border directly escalated geopolitical risks by two levels. At that time, an open-source intelligence organization analyzed 10-meter resolution imagery and mistakenly identified wind turbine bases as missile silos, causing Bellingcat’s verification matrix to spike with a 29% abnormal deviation—a situation that would have panicked ordinary organizations, but the response from China’s public security system was truly impressive.
Their first reaction wasn’t to delete posts but to activate a triple-verification protocol: 1) accessing raw military satellite data with 1-meter resolution; 2) verifying nearby base station communication density; 3) cross-checking vehicle trajectories from the BeiDou navigation system. This combination reduced the probability of misjudgment to below 3% within 24 hours, finishing 15 minutes faster than Palantir’s Metropolis system.
Verification Dimension
Civilian Solution
Public Security Solution
Error Tolerance Threshold
Image Update Frequency
Every 6 hours
Real-time stream
＞2 hours triggers circuit breaker
Data Collection Nodes
Public API
BeiDou + 5G base stations
Dual-channel verification
During last year’s Zhengzhou floods, the system detected a sudden surge in language model perplexity on a Telegram channel to 92 (normal values should be below 85), with evacuation routes containing traps. Cyber police immediately initiated spatiotemporal hash verification: checking the publisher’s device timezone (showing UTC+8 but actual IP in Thailand), verifying road water depth data, and reviewing live footage from rescue vehicles’ dashcams. Within 20 minutes, this information bomb was defused.
Heatmap refresh rate compressed from 15 minutes to 47 seconds
Base station positioning accuracy improved from 50 meters to 7 meters (thanks to 5G micro-base station density)
When dealing with tough challenges like dark web data leaks, technical investigation departments use Docker image fingerprint tracing. Last year, when a medical database was posted on the dark web, they traced clues such as Python library versions (3.8.12 → 3.9.7) and compilation timestamps (UTC+3 but showing Beijing time zone). Within 7 days, they identified the insider—1.8 times faster than Mandiant’s average response time.
Handling emergencies no longer relies on manpower tactics. The system can automatically detect satellite image UTC timestamp ±3-second anomalies or sudden bursts of specific keyword clusters in WeChat groups. For example, during last month’s building collapse in Changsha, AI completed within 23 seconds: 1) building shadow azimuth analysis; 2) detection of abnormal vehicle clustering; 3) triangulation of 120 emergency call locations, beating on-site eyewitness reports by 6 minutes.
The recently upgraded warning model is even more advanced—combining Bayesian networks with LSTM predictions. It can predict gathering points 40 minutes in advance for mass incidents, achieving 89% accuracy. During a strike at a Shenzhen factory, the system detected unusual cafeteria consumption data (dinner purchases dropped 60%) and employee chat sentiment fluctuations, delivering control plans to command vehicles before the situation escalated.
How to Conduct Community Policing?
Community police officer Lao Zhang received two alerts right after his morning meeting at 8 AM: Grandma Wang’s smart water meter showed no activity for 12 consecutive hours, and the urban village rental registration system flagged three new residents without permits. Such scenarios occur over 30 times daily in Longhua Street, Shenzhen, powered by a “human + technology” grid-based practical model.
Basic information collection isn’t just about filling forms. Landlords often claim tenants will “register in two days,” allowing fugitives like Li Mou to hide for 47 days under their noses. Now, officers’ police pads automatically compare ID photos with the Ministry of Public Security database, triggering secondary verification if facial similarity falls below 83%. Last year, a community in Futian caught nine fugitives in seven months using this mechanism.
Visit frequency: key individuals twice a week, regular households once per quarter
Information updates: basic data updated quarterly, special group data updated in real-time
Anomaly alerts: smart electricity/water meter data fluctuations exceeding 37% trigger alarms
Handling domestic disputes tests skills the most. Last month, a couple in a neighborhood quarreled about divorce, with the husband moving a gas tank into the living room, threatening mutual destruction. Officer Lao Chen arrived and did three things first: recorded video evidence, contacted property management to cut off the gas valve, and had a female officer take the wife to a supermarket downstairs “to buy water.” After calming the husband, he brought in both sets of parents and community mediators for discussion.
Dispute Type
Resolution Time
Success Rate
Family Conflicts
≤2 hours
78%
Neighbor Disputes
≤4 hours
91%
Property Conflicts
≤24 hours
65%
Security awareness campaigns can’t rely solely on flyers. Bao’an District piloted anti-fraud stickers on delivery packages, which could be scanned to watch real case videos. A young man watched one while unpacking and, the next day, when encountering a fake customer service scam, blurted out “Your script matches the video exactly,” leaving the scammer stunned.
Technological solutions are getting more sophisticated. Smart access control systems in urban villages look like ordinary iron gates but can detect electric bikes charging upstairs. Last winter, a resident hid a battery in a blanket, but infrared temperature sensors detected the heat source, triggering an alarm 17 minutes faster than manual checks. Each unit costs over 80,000 yuan, but fire alarms dropped 42% that quarter after installation.
Managing key personnel remains challenging. Former drug user Liu Mou always claimed he was delivering food, but his bike trajectory showed him circling elementary schools daily. Officers overlaid his route with school schedules, discovering his appearance probability increased threefold during dismissal times, preventing his planned extreme retaliation against society.
Examples of Police-Public Cooperation
Last summer, a tenant in Hangzhou threw out seven or eight milk tea cups daily during garbage sorting—each marked with mysterious numbers at the bottom. The neighborhood committee auntie pulled out her police app, sending suspicious photos to the precinct officer’s alert system within three minutes. Guess what? It turned out to be a pyramid scheme using milk tea codes for communication.
Such operations are now standard at the grassroots level. Take Zhejiang’s “Safe Eye” system, where convenience store owners upload suspicious person info via scans, the backend automatically compares it with over 30 data sources from the past 3 hours. Last month in Wenzhou, a hardware store owner photographed a customer buying 20 kitchen knives, triggering an “abnormal purchase alert.” Cross-referencing revealed he’d bought 50 meters of rope in a neighboring county the day before.
Data collision rates exceed 87%: Cainiao courier scanners perform 13 risk checks when scanning parcels, faster than auxiliary police memorizing faces
Community elders’ phones act as mobile sentries: Chaoyang residents reported 17 fake health code users last year through “gate access scanning”
Courier e-bikes are equipped with GPS: In Shenzhen, a courier station helped police catch someone stuffing black cards into parcel lockers
The most impressive was the pandemic contact tracing system. A confirmed case in Shanghai visited “FamilyMart 23:58-00:02.” Police reviewed footage, seeing he only bought cigarettes, but the system, based on Alipay payment time + store camera timestamps + mobile base station location, reconstructed his full path, revealing contact with three delivery drivers.
Behind these operations lies real technological competition. An intelligent gate in Guangzhou appeared ordinary but included liveness detection and voiceprint recognition. Once, it caught someone with a fake ID. The system compared background noise spectra while he spoke, finding a 91% match with recordings from a theft three months earlier.
Police-public cooperation is becoming increasingly hardcore. During last year’s typhoon in Xiamen, couriers’ delivery trajectories were requisitioned to generate real-time flooded road heatmaps. One courier’s GPS showed him circling an intersection, prompting the command center to send a rescue boat—he was helping an old lady retrieve her dentures blown away by the wind.
