The former head of Wulabo Police Station in Urumqi's Dabancheng district in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region has been posthumously awarded the title of National Second-Level Hero Model of the public security system.

Cui Wenliang collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage while on duty in March last year. He was 51.

Cui spent years doing community police work that rarely made headlines.

He checked on elderly residents living alone, helped farmers bring in their harvest and led officers on remote patrols to protect oil pipelines, gas lines and communication cables. When emergencies came, he was often the first to step forward.

Over 26 years in service, Cui handled more than 900 cases, promoted community-based initiatives and devoted himself to protecting public safety in one of Urumqi's most challenging grassroots jurisdictions.

To colleagues and residents, Cui was more than a police officer. He was a man who measured peace and security not in slogans, but in footsteps — walking village roads, knocking on doors and remembering who needed help.

Born in 1973, Cui joined the public service in 1996, entering the police force in 1999. Over the decades, he remained on the front line of maintaining stability and serving the public. Those who worked with him said he believed a police station should not only fight crime, but also solve the practical problems that shaped daily life.

When he took charge of Dabancheng Police Station in 2009, the station had long ranked near the bottom in performance assessments. Morale was low and work lacked momentum. Cui responded with stricter discipline, clearer accountability, and a hands-on management style.

He spoke with officers individually, assigned duties according to their strengths and gradually rebuilt the team. Within two years, the station had turned around and ranked first for three consecutive years in district evaluations starting in 2011.

Colleagues said he cared not only about officers' performance, but also about their difficulties at home. In 2019, when an officer's wife suffered severe postpartum bleeding, Cui took the lead in donating blood and mobilized colleagues to contribute money for her treatment. That combination of discipline and warmth became a defining feature of his leadership.

The jurisdiction he later oversaw at Wulabo Police Station was vast, sparsely populated and difficult to police. Located at Urumqi's eastern gateway, the area has more than 200 windy days a year and frequent winter snowdrifts.

It also contains key infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and communication links. Protecting those lifelines required long patrols through remote, uninhabited areas.

Cui threw himself into the work, helping promote smarter patrol systems using video surveillance, electronic fencing and other technologies. Under those measures, the area's major lifeline routes remained free from serious damage for years. However, Cui never relied on technology alone. He believed in combining professional tools with hard legwork.

Facing a community marked by shuttered factories, vacant houses, an aging population and growing numbers of migrants, he led officers door to door to learn local conditions through everyday conversations.

He mobilized residents to form volunteer patrol and mediation teams, helping build a wider network for dispute prevention and resolution. Over time, criminal cases in the area declined.

He also earned a reputation for persistence in difficult investigations. In 2023, more than 200 meters of industrial cable valued at over 200,000 yuan ($29,500) were stolen from a fertilizer factory in Xinjiang. The thieves had replaced the missing cable with hollow pipes of similar diameter, delaying discovery and complicating the investigation. After extensive groundwork and about a week of effort, Cui led officers to arrest seven core members of the theft ring and linked them to multiple related cases.

Years earlier, while working at Dabancheng Police Station, Cui proposed building a detailed archive for every household under the station's jurisdiction.

The painstaking work later proved crucial.

In 2011, when a series of thefts involving livestock and farm property stalled, Cui came up with an unusual strategy: "Find the cattle to find the suspects".

Officers retrieved photographs and identifying details of the stolen animals from household archives, then traveled to livestock markets across six locations to compare animals one by one. After three months of investigation, they recovered 11 stolen cattle, three motorcycles and other farm materials, helping victims recover losses of more than 200,000 yuan.

For Cui, however, policing was never only about solving cases.

In a jurisdiction where many residents were elderly, lived alone or struggled to access public services, he promoted a simple rule of doing at least one good deed for the public every week. Over time, the station recorded more than 800 such acts in what became known as its "book of service for the people".

He organized officers to identify elderly, disabled and isolated residents in need of regular help, and formed a volunteer service team to provide visits, emergency aid, emotional support, medical assistance and legal help.

One elderly woman, hospitalized after a fall and facing medical bills of more than 9,000 yuan, received not only Cui's personal donation but also the support he organized across the station. Colleagues said such acts reflected his belief that police work should be measured not only by cases solved, but also by the trust earned from ordinary people.

Residents often saw him appear in moments of crisis. He climbed onto rooftops to save people threatening suicide, carried stranded residents out of vehicles trapped in blizzards, trekked through mountain areas to help herders recover lost sheep, and helped tourists find missing children. These moments stayed with residents long after they passed.

After news of Cui's death spread, a 97-year-old resident insisted on being helped downstairs to see him off one last time. At his memorial, hundreds of residents and fellow officers came to pay their respects. One 70-year-old woman, crying, said he had cared for her like a son.

Behind Cui's years of public service was a family that quietly shared the burden. His wife, Liu Guifen, shouldered family responsibilities largely on her own for 22 years, caring for elderly relatives and their daughter while Cui often returned home only once every two weeks during busy periods. After his death, despite her own illness, Liu said she was proud that the people had needed a police officer like him.

Their daughter, now a university student, said she had wanted to become a police officer since the age of 4 and hoped to continue the path her father had followed.

Among Cui's belongings were work diaries filled with field notes and reflections. In them, he wrote about fierce winds during patrols, regret over time not spent with family, and his determination to do his job well despite life's inevitable regrets.

In one entry, after listening to an elderly war veteran speak, he wrote that though the color had changed from military uniform to police uniform, the loyalty running in the blood remained the same.

yangzekun@chinadaily.com.cn