Anti-gang campaign: Female bureau chief

Looking at the woman in front of him, Zhou Pei suddenly remembered the day two years ago when he drove her to Yi'an to register.

At that time, she was sitting in the passenger seat, looking at the barren farmland on both sides of the highway, her face expressionless, but her right hand unconsciously tightened its grip on a water glass.

At that time, she was thirty-three years old and was parachuted into a city that had been infiltrated by criminal gangs for thirty years as the police chief. She was met with Qin Chuan's scrutiny, Fang Xuewen's probing, Shen Wangshan's show of force, and an abyss where she herself did not know if she could survive for more than three months.

Two years later, Shen Wangshan and Gu Changhe have both been executed, the names of all 37 people have been recovered, and Yi'an's security data has gone from being at the bottom of the province to being among the top.

But she said that wasn't enough; she said she wanted to dismantle the supporting framework piece by piece, and that she wanted to make changes to the system.

She has changed a lot—two more fine lines appeared at the corners of her eyes, a few gray hairs sprouted at her temples, and there was something deeper in her eyes that were once as sharp as a knife.

But when she said these words, her tone was exactly the same as when she said in the car two years ago, "Then I'll use the rules to beat them."

Zhou Pei saw something unchanging in her—something that, after being tempered, became even harder, something ingrained in her bones.

"Okay, I'll hand it to you," Zhou Pei said, then added, "But you won't be back until the seventh day of the Lunar New Year. Can you please stop focusing on writing these next few days? Your mother called me and said that as soon as you got home, you locked yourself in your room reading documents and wouldn't even go shopping with her."

Jiang Ruolan's expression subtly changed, a look that only appeared when her mother was mentioned—a mixture of helplessness and guilt: "She called you?"

"She called on New Year's Eve, saying she wanted to ask if I had any cough medicine—she said your throat was sore, and winters in Yi'an are damp and cold, so she was worried you might get pharyngitis. Then she went on to complain about you for half an hour." Zhou Pei said with a smile, patted her shoulder, and turned to walk towards the elevator.

Jiang Ruolan stood there, watching Zhou Pei's figure disappear at the end of the corridor, then folded the document and put it in her pocket.

She took out her phone, opened WeChat, and sent a message to her mother: "Mom, I'll go shopping with you tomorrow morning. We'll eat out for lunch, it's on me."

I received a reply less than ten seconds after sending the message.

Song Wanqing only replied with two words: "What time?" plus an emoji—a chubby cat holding a fish with the words "Absolutely".

Jiang Ruolan looked at the emoji, her lips curved slightly, then she put away her phone and walked towards the parking lot.

On the seventh day of the Lunar New Year, Jiang Ruolan returned to Yi'an.

The city is awakening from the leisurely atmosphere of the Lunar New Year holiday—shops on the street are gradually opening their doors, breakfast stalls are setting up their steamers again, and tower cranes in the eastern new district are starting to rotate, lifting steel bars and cement into the air.

The first thing she did upon returning to the Municipal Bureau was not to go to her office, but to visit the relocation and reconstruction site of the Chengdong Police Station.

The site of this police station was already included in the demolition area by Fengmao Real Estate during Shen Wangshan's time. The police officers were crammed into a leaky bungalow to handle cases, and no one cared that the paint on the four characters "People's Public Security" on the door was peeling off.

After the case of four sets of remains being unearthed at the construction site in the east of the city broke out, the provincial department specially approved a sum of money for the relocation and reconstruction of the Chengdong Police Station.

The new site is located at an intersection less than two kilometers from the old site, with convenient transportation. The surrounding area includes a newly built resettlement housing community and a primary school.

When she arrived at the construction site, the main structure had already been completed.

The four-story frame stood in the winter sun, the exterior walls not yet tiled, the gray concrete surface exposed to the air, emitting a fresh cement smell.

Several workers were installing lightning rods on the roof. When they saw her standing downstairs in her police uniform, they all stopped what they were doing and called out to her, "Happy New Year, Director Jiang."

She raised her hand in greeting, then walked into the main entrance, which hadn't yet been fitted with a door.

The lobby on the first floor was very spacious, larger than many of the service halls of district and county public security bureaus she had seen.

The design drawings show a reception area, a household registration window, an alarm registration desk, and a special petition reception room—this was added at her special request because in Yi'an, many people dare not report to the municipal bureau, let alone the provincial bureau; they trust the local police station the most.

If the police station's doors weren't big enough and bright enough, they might never walk in.

She stood in the empty hall for a while, imagining that a few months later there would be a reception desk, a queuing system, and police officers in new uniforms sitting behind the windows, before turning around and walking out of the construction site.

In the afternoon, the official document from the provincial department arrived—the Yi'an City Public Security Bureau was upgraded to a deputy provincial-level institution, and Jiang Ruolan continued to serve as the director, with her rank adjusted to deputy provincial-level.

The document included a staffing expansion plan approved by the Provincial Organization and Personnel Bureau, which expanded the Criminal Investigation Detachment from 60 to 90 people, added two criminal investigation squads to the Shiqiao County Bureau, and upgraded all three police stations in the East, West, and North of the City to the level of full-fledged sections, while simultaneously strengthening criminal investigation technical capabilities and equipment.

The last page of the document contains a handwritten note from the director, consisting of only one line: "I hope you will continue your efforts and further develop the Yi'an experience."

After reading the document, Jiang Ruolan locked it in the drawer.

Then she opened a new notebook and wrote down several key tasks to be tackled in the new year on the first page:

Three-year plan for capacity building of grassroots police stations, construction plan for cross-departmental information sharing platform, training plan for a talent pool of criminal investigation technology personnel, and mechanism for routine screening of old cases involving organized crime.

Each item had a blank box next to it, waiting for her to fill them in one by one.

Her pen paused on "cross-departmental information sharing" and drew a circle.

The biggest bottleneck in Yi'an's experience lies here—the Public Security Bureau can solve cases, arrest people, and secure evidence, but industry rectification involves more than a dozen departments, including land, environmental protection, housing and construction, and market supervision, and the barriers between departments are the most difficult things to break down in any city.

She set a deadline for herself: by the first half of this year, she must normalize the inter-departmental joint meeting system and open up the interfaces for information sharing.

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