软鞭 有哪些:Theft reveals lapses in Chinese Museum’s secu...

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/04/27 13:45:09

Theft reveals lapses in Chinese Museum’s security



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2011-5-15 11:16

A bungled art theft this week at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing may not have been worthy of a master thief, with the police quickly claiming to have found the suspect, but the episode has nonetheless produced questions and criticism about security at Chinese museums.


Details of the theft from the police and museum officials — and a brief, televised confession by the burglary suspect — suggest an amateurish effort that art experts said the museum should have been prepared to withstand. But the official account also left some unanswered questions, including whether the suspect was acting alone.



According to museum and police officials, the burglar bashed open at least one display case and took nine of the purses and powder cases, all of Western design and made in the 20th century, including a round Tiffany powder case from the 1950s. Another case with even more valuable objects in the same temporary exhibition was also battered, but it did not break open and nothing was lost from it.


Before the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and ever since, the police have festooned mile after mile of lampposts along Beijing roads with thousands of outdoor surveillance cameras, while the Forbidden City itself has hundreds of them.


In a report that appeared to suggest a more ambitious criminal scheme, The Beijing Evening News cited an unidentified source as saying that someone had cut off the electricity to at least part of the museum before the display cases were robbed, depriving the museum’s surveillance center of video.


The Palace Museum issued an apology and said it would improve security.


Art experts were highly critical of the museum on Thursday as details of the crime dribbled out.


“It’s a great embarrassment for what is considered to be the premier museum of China,” said Marc F. Wilson, a prominent Chinese art expert and the former chief executive of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.


At the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Nationalists took most of the Palace Museum’s best works to Taiwan. But the Palace Museum in Beijing occupies a special place in China as a symbol of national heritage, like the Louvre in Paris or the Prado in Madrid.


Most art museums now take special precautions with gold or bejeweled artifacts because these tend to draw amateur thieves, Mr. Wilson said. The exhibit should have had very tough plexiglass that would have resisted battering for quite a while, as well as motion detectors and surveillance cameras.


Chinese law requires that all Internet cafes and nightclubs have security cameras that continuously send images directly to neighborhood police stations. Face recognition computer software is being rapidly installed at police stations across the nation to process these images, according to surveillance industry executives.


The software tends to produce a lot of false positives — people who may bear a passing resemblance to a suspect. But Chinese law provides few legal remedies for cases of false arrest, making it easier for the police to use the technology on a large scale.


In a statement, the Beijing police said only that the suspect had been found “through the use of technology in an era of Internet cafes,” and noted that the case had been cracked in only 58 hours. (New York Times)
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