Shenzhen police had busted 16 mafia-style organizations and 73 criminal gangs, and solved 5,594 criminal cases with 10,038 criminals arrested, by the end of 2019, according to a news conference yesterday afternoon.
Assets worth over 11.08 billion yuan (US$1.58 billion) have been frozen or seized by police, Liang Zengchang, executive deputy secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee of the CPC Shenzhen Municipal Committee, said at the news conference.
This year will mark the final year of the city’s move to combat mafia-style crime.
Shenzhen courts have concluded the trials of 198 criminal cases involving mafia-style organizations and criminal rings, including one with a total of 158 suspects. The confiscation and fines reached 75.59 million yuan.
Shenzhen Municipal People’s Procuratorate had arrested 1,553 suspects in 400 cases as of the end of last year, according to Zhan Xianjian, vice chief of the Shenzhen procuratorate, at the news conference.
Shenzhen police have investigated 9,199 cases related to pornography, gambling and drug abuse, and arrested 2,894 suspects, according to Yu Hongjun with the Shenzhen criminal police force.
Yu mentioned a case where a criminal ring disseminated lots of videos involving pornographic content through an application called “Kuaiyaojing” to attract clients online.
Before the crackdown, the platform had over 1 million registered users. A total of 200 users had been paid to upload over 1,000 pornographic videos to the platform, through which over 30 gambling websites had been promoted.
“The use of serious violence saw an evident drop. On the contrary, the use of soft violence, like verbal threats, has become more common among mafia-style criminals. Additionally, new types of online crime have become more and more popular,” said Yu when asked about recent changes in organized crime.