A micro blog user prompted a quick response from local police by posting an incident involving a uniformed officer beating an elderly woman on a street in Jinan, the China Youth Daily reported on Thursday.
The message from the netizen Liu about the street chaos, posted at 18:32 on Wednesday, was soon forwarded many times on the Internet.
The police in Jinan, Shandong province, reacted via its micro blog later at 20:15 by confirming that it was a female prison guard, not a police officer, involved in the case. She had stopped to fix her vehicle when the incident occurred. She has been detained and interrogated at the police station.
Eleven minutes later, another micro blog message from the local police reiterated that the police are taking the case seriously.
At 20:26, Liu said in another post that it was a man beating the elderly woman and he has been taken away by police.
At 22:21, the police went on blogging: "The female prison guard surnamed Lin quarreled with the elderly couple as she fixed her vehicle, and she sent her husband, a doctor at a hospital, to beat the elderly woman."
According to the report, the injured woman was rushed to the hospital. The police are further investigating the case.
Shen Yang, a professor at Wuhan University, said that this was a good example of police reacting to micro blog news.
