dingdiange:
In the evening after dinner, Zhao Jun summoned officials from Ji County.
The reason why we did not meet with them immediately was because we needed to understand the situation of these officials.
If there are problems, they must be corrected. If there are no problems and they have done a good job in their position, they can be summoned and praised with an encouraging speech.
Since the officials of Ji County had no bad record and although their governance methods were mediocre, they completed the tasks assigned to them on time and did nothing out of the ordinary, he did not criticize them harshly.
Give them a few words of encouragement and let them go.
The next day, the Ji County Lieutenant and the Imperial City Commander reported the situation.
They have arrested everyone in the two villages involved in the case, including the elderly, the weak, women and children, and are now all locked up in the county jail.
Zhao Jun gave instructions.
The criminals must be severely punished, those who deserve the death penalty should be sentenced to death, and those who deserve the exile should be exiled. Only such severe punishment can serve as a deterrent.
As for the families of the bandits, although they did not participate directly, they also participated in keeping watch, resisting the government, or enjoyed the property looted by the bandits.
We cannot say that they are guilty of the same crime, but they still need to be sentenced to a certain extent.
Basically, after the verdict is announced, it is estimated that most of the young and strong laborers in the two villages will be killed or exiled.
In addition, many women also had to serve their sentences in jail, and innocent children and elderly people who were not involved in the crime were raised in orphanages and Futianyuan built by the government. It was no different from a village massacre.
But there is nothing we can do about it.
If we don't do this, it won't serve as a deterrent. If other villages follow suit, no merchants will dare to pass through here.
How would the economy develop then? Goods from outside couldn't come in, and Jixian's products couldn't go out. This would be extremely unfair to the rest of the county's law-abiding citizens.
So faced with this phenomenon, Zhao Jun had no choice but to do this.
On the third day, after handing over the case of the water bandits to the local authorities, Zhao Jun set off again to Wu'an for inspection.
The first stop of this trip was to Youyan to inspect the current integration situation. As for Hebei, it was just a visit while passing by, and it was impossible to stay for long.
Therefore, you only need to stay in each place for two or three days at most.
As for the nationwide bandit problem caused by the water bandits, Zhao Jun also noted it among the issues to be resolved. After returning, he would have to think of a solution.
no way.
Bandits are different from criminal gangs.
The evil forces are entrenched in nature, often in towns with concentrated populations, or the landlord class organizes thugs to control tenant farmers.
They have fixed places and incomes, and even own fields, casinos, restaurants, brothels and other entertainment venues. They plunder the people's property through violence, so it is relatively easy to clear them out.
But bandits are different.
They do not have a fixed territory. Many of them move to another location after each shot, and the crime locations are not fixed.
Many of them are located on major traffic routes in the wild. They are elusive and mobile in nature, making it very difficult to eradicate them. Sometimes we don’t even know who did it.
Therefore, compared with the evil forces, these bandits are the most difficult to deal with, and we can only take it one step at a time.
More than ten days later, Zhao Jun's caravan passed Weizhou, Anlijun, Xiangzhou, and entered the territory of Fuyang, Cizhou, only sixty or seventy miles away from Wuan.
After staying in Fuyang for a day and inspecting the local situation, Zhao Jun set off for Wu'an the next day. When passing by Zhaode Town, he stopped to rest for a while, drank some tea and sat down at a nearby tea stall.
It was late March, the sun was shining, spring was in full bloom, and Mount Fu in the northwest, which later became the Nanxiangtang Mountain, was towering and densely forested, as beautiful as a fairyland.
Although the town is small, it is bustling with merchants. The town is not surprised to see large groups of merchants and is warmly received.
After a short break, the three hundred people filled all the empty seats at the surrounding tea stalls. There were even many people without seats, so they could only squat on the roadside with their cold tea. Occasionally, a carriage passed by, raising dust all over their faces.
Zhao Jun sat in the middle seat. Wang Anshi noticed that he had been writing something on paper with a pencil for the past few days, so he asked curiously, "Is the prefect recording something?"
"Um."
Zhao Jun stopped writing, looked up and smiled, "Write down all the problems you encountered along the way and list them one by one. A good memory is not as good as a bad pen."
Then he turned to the crowd, "That's right, I've already listed quite a few. Come and help me analyze them."
"This is the first one. There are so many bandits in the country. What do you say we should do?"
He looked around at everyone.
Yang Gao said, "We should kill one to warn the rest!"
"It's right to use severe punishment."
Zhao Jun said, "But the problem is that it's very difficult to catch the person. If we hadn't encountered the Jixian incident, do you think ordinary merchants would be able to survive and file a complaint?"
"Forehead"
Yang Gao thought so too. They couldn't even catch the person, let alone impose any severe punishment.
Su Huan said, "Perhaps we could have the local authorities conduct a secret investigation and adopt a suspicious attitude towards the villages surrounding the crime. The court could also issue a document demanding that all localities solve this case to show that the court takes the frequent banditry seriously."
"This is a valid idea, but I'm afraid it could lead to wrongful convictions."
Zhao Jun sighed.
"Why?"
Everyone was puzzled.
Zhao Jun asked, "Do you know what problem the Ji County Magistrate reported to me a few days ago?"
"What's the problem?"
"In the case in Ji County four years ago, the silk merchant's family came to the local authorities and paid them money in the hope that they would solve the case. The local officials took the money and ended up arresting people everywhere, beating and fining them arbitrarily, causing public outrage. In the end, they couldn't find the person responsible, and they even almost found a scapegoat. If it weren't for the inspection by the Imperial Inspector, I'm afraid someone would have been tortured into confessing and wrongly accused of robbery."
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