It might help. With everything being public, an eventual typical police inactivity would also be public. There's some incentives for them to actually do their job (even because most of the job's done already).
If everything is done entirely in private, the police could just behave as usual (i.e., do nothing useful) and that would be it.

But you do have a point. Perhaps they should have tried to contact Zhou before releasing his private data like this.

This is all quite delicate.