Police in Zhejiang province recently said they will no longer evaluate an officer's job performance strictly by the numbers, like how many cases he has solved. An editorial in Beijing News advocates that more provinces follow suit (excerpts below).

It has long been a common practice of police authorities to evaluate officers' performance by certain numbers: the rate of solving cases, the number of cases solved, etc.

The purpose of introducing such an evaluation system may be encouraging officers to be more efficient. However, it is debatable whether the numbers matter. For example, to get a higher success rate of solving cases, many local officers simply refuse to register cases like the burglary of small amounts of money; worse, some officers might extort confessions by torture from suspects to improve the performance rating.

That’s why Zhejiang's new decision is welcome. The officers will be free from the burden of pursuing higher scores, thus helping them better maintain public security.

Other provinces and cities — for example, Beijing — also have introduced new evaluation systems that do not rely on numbers. Hopefully, more provinces will follow that example.