The National Police Agency (NPA) will work with the Taichung city government and its police bureau to fight crime in an effort to improve the central city's public order, Premier Wu Den-yih said Tuesday. Responding to media reports that the NPA has agreed to post 40 SWAT officers in the central city after a string of gunfights among gangsters on the city streets in broad daylight have been reported in the past three months, Wu said Taichung's public order faces complex challenges commonly seen in other emerging metropolises around the world. 'To deal with its increasingly complicated crime-fighting duties, the city's police force might be inadequate and might need assistance from the central government, ' Wu said, adding that the NPA has not hesitated to assign SWAT personnel to help with the city's battle against organized crime. It is the fifth time since 1999 that the Taichung city police bureau has sought SWAT assistance to maintain public order. Saying that remarkable progress has been made in Taichung's infrastructure construction and economic development in recent years, Wu said the central government will collaborate with its city administration and police bureau in an attempt to prevent a recurrence of daytime street gunbattles. Asked whether the city's public order has deteriorated, however, Wu said Taichung's public order has been 'improving steadily' in terms of national criminal incident figures. 'However, the public invariably demands stricter and more effective crime- fighting measures whenever a major criminal case arises,' Wu said. Saying that the number of felonies has been on a steady decline in Taiwan, while the solving rate for major criminal cases is rising, Wu said the government will not be complacent about improvements that are just statistics. 'Law enforcement officers will be reminded not to gauge their achievements just in terms of numerical assessments, Wu said, adding that they will be told to pay equal attention to people's feelings by resolving the many pending burglary cases. Meanwhile, Hu Mu-yuan, head of the Taichung City Police Bureau, said the bureau's application for SWAT team aid is not prompted by its loss of control of the city's public order but rather by the fact that many of its police officers have been assigned to carry out special criminal investigations. The 40 SWAT team members are expected to begin their mission in Taichung from Wednesday at the earliest, Hu said, adding that the officers, trained to combat terrorism and other felonies, will conduct spot checks day and night over the coming two months on major city streets and other places known to be frequented by gangsters. During a question and answer session at the Taichung City Council Monday, several city councilors grilled Mayor Jason Hu on what has gone wrong with the city's public order. Over the past nearly nine years, the councilors said the city's police budget has increased from NT$3 billion to NT$5 billion and the number of police officers has expanded from 2,500 to 4,052. But many city dwellers are still haunted by daylight gunfights on the city's streets, the councilors said. Every time, shooting incidents happen, they said, the mayor tends to declare a war on gangsters or organized crime, but those declarations have not shown satisfactory results. The councilors, including Chen Shu-hua, Chang Liao Wang-chien and Ho Ming-chen, said the mayor should consider stepping down and let somebody else deal with the issue. On the councilors' demand that he resign to take the blame for Taichung's poor public order, Hu rejected the idea, saying his resignation would amount to surrendering to criminal rings. 'We will work to the best of our ability to prevent a recurrence of similar shooting incidents, ' Hu said, adding that to him, every bullet fired by gangsters was like a shot at him. 