Hong Kong Geheime Staatspolizei

Hong Kong Police, Seen as ‘Hounds After Rabbits,’ Face Rising Rage
The shooting of a teenage protester has amplified anger at a police force that Hongkongers see as a symbol of Beijing’s unchecked power.
By Raymond Zhong and Tiffany May
Riot police officers clash with protesters in Wong Tai Sin in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

HONG KONG — A woman was hit in the eye during a protest. 

Passengers were beaten on a subway train. 

A student was shot in the chest with a live round — and now is being charged with rioting.
Each increase in the Hong Kong police’s use of force during the antigovernment protests has been met with greater anger from the public and more combativeness from hard-core demonstrators, which in turn have prompted more intense tactics from the police.
After four months of spiraling unrest, the question now is whether police officers can handle more escalations in violence without escalating it further themselves — or if the city’s thinly stretched force is bound to continue adding to the protests’ chaos and frenzy. 

The 30,000-strong Hong Kong Police Force has become a symbol of what protesters regard as the unchecked power with which Beijing governs the semiautonomous Chinese territory.
Many recent demonstrations have ended with a sad, predictable coda in which residents of all ages come into the streets to heckle and scream at police officers. 

A crowd gathered earlier this week around officers who had handcuffed a dozen protesters, mostly young women, in the Wong Tai Sin area.
“Don’t you dare lay a finger on those girls!” yelled Mei Wong, a 60-year-old resident. 

“You won’t have a good afterlife if you do.”
In a sign of the strain on officers, one police group has called for the Hong Kong government to impose curfews or adopt other emergency measures that it said would help the police get a better grip on the situation. 

Hong Kong government officials have been discussing whether the city’s leader, Carrie Lam, should invoke emergency powers to impose a ban on face masks, said Ronny Tong, a member of Lam’s executive council, her top advisory body.
“We are only a law enforcement agency with limited power under the law,” Lam Chi-wai, the chairman of the Junior Police Officers’ Association, said in a statement on Wednesday. 

“If we do not have appropriate and strong measures from the top to coordinate and assist, then it will be hard for us to achieve anything on our own.”
The police force has said that one of its officers shot Tsang Chi-kin, an 18-year-old student, in "self-defense" this week, and has described its officers as being under siege. 

On Wednesday night, protesters outraged by the shooting poured into the streets, vandalizing shops, blocking roads and throwing firebombs into a police station. 

Many of them put their hands on their chests to express solidarity with Mr. Tsang.
On Thursday, the police said that Mr. Tsang had been charged with rioting and assaulting police officers — a development that is likely to further inflame tensions.
Hong Kong has more police officers per capita than London. 

It spends around 10 percent of its budget on security, and battling drugs and organized crime has remained a priority.

Most Hong Kong officers receive training in crowd control, part of the legacy of the police force’s origins as an enforcer of colonial power during the territory’s 150 years under British rule.
After a series of disturbances in the 1950s and ’60s, the police created a public order unit and instituted anti-riot training. 

The more immediate template for this year’s police response was set during the monthslong democracy protests in 2014, which featured the city’s first use of tear gas in years. 

After those demonstrations ended, the city bought three water cannon trucks that have since been deployed at this year’s protests.
Protesters use a cone to control a tear gas canister in a standoff outside the Legco Building in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

The anti-riot division that was created during the colonial era, the Police Tactical Unit, has been a regular presence at recent street clashes. 

The blue berets that are normally part of the unit’s uniforms are typically swapped out these days for riot helmets, supplemented by shields.
“In normal circumstances, it is a civilian force,” said Lawrence Ka-ki Ho, a professor at the Education University of Hong Kong who studies policing. 

“But at the same time, if necessary, it may be turned into an armylike squad.”
Furor over the police’s crowd control methods first erupted early this summer, after officers tear-gassed and beat largely peaceful demonstrators on June 12. 

The authorities seemed to pull back somewhat in response, including when protesters twice surrounded police headquarters.
But the sieges of the headquarters were an important turning point for the police, said Ray Yep, a professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong. 

“They believe they have been humiliated.”
Since then, the police have stepped up the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and on-site arrests. 

Riot police officers and protesters in Wong Tai Sin in Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Senior police commanders say that they are working to ensure that officers act professionally despite the chaos and the pressure. 

But the force can not keep its people from overstepping boundaries in the heat of the moment.
The police’s use of tear gas is indiscriminate and excessive, with canisters fired in subway stations and from perches above crowds. 

Tempers flared again when a senior police official suggested that a man in a yellow shirt, whom officers were accused of abusing, was in fact a “yellow object.”
Officers at protests have been seen obscuring or not wearing identifying badges, to evade scrutiny.
“When they come out, it is like hounds after rabbits,” said Clement Lai, a former police superintendent who resigned in 2015 to start a private security company. 

From what he has seen, police officers have seemed to be driven by an “adrenaline rush,” he said.
Jeffery Wu, 36, served in the police during street protests against a World Trade Organization conference in 2005.
“All the tactics the police have used these past few months have violated what I learned when I was studying at the police academy,” Mr. Wu said. 

“In the past, the way tear gas is deployed was stringently monitored. But the police are no longer controllable now.”

Emergency medics evacuate a wounded protester who was shot in the chest with a nonlethal round by a police officer on Tuesday.

Police representatives have also resisted efforts to be held to account for officers’ actions, one of the main demands of the protesters. 

One police group expressed outrage after the city’s No. 2 official apologized for the police’s handling of a mob attack.

The city’s deputy police commissioner, Tang Ping-keung, said during a news conference on Wednesday that the force was “well-prepared, confident and determined to bring Hong Kong back on the right track.”
At the same time, the government in mainland China has deepened the divide between Hong Kong’s police and its public by vocally backing violent local law enforcement.
James A. Elms, 76, a retired police officer who served during the unrest of the 1960s, said that today the Hong Kong police were seen as standing for communist China, not against it, as was the case in colonial times.
The protesters “don’t hate the cops,” he said. 

“They hate what they see behind the cops.”

Hong Kong Geheime Staatspolizei

Unidentified flinching object: In Hong Kong protests, police wage assault on facts
By David Crawshaw and Timothy McLaughlin

Riot police move to disperse protesters outside a police station in Hong Kong early Monday. 

HONG KONG — The “yellow object” lying on the ground had a distinct shape, evident in the video footage that surfaced later. 

Certainly, a good portion of it was bright yellow. 

It appeared to have arms. 

And two protrusions that resembled legs. 

Someone had dressed the object in dark-colored shorts.
As Hong Kong police officers swarmed over the object and roughed it up in a dark alley, it appeared to squirm.
In a city grown accustomed to clashes between demonstrators and police as the government responds to months of protests with tear gas and mass arrests, the incident on Saturday and the official response to it illustrated a breakdown in the relationship between the police force and the public.


Galileo Cheng@galileocheng
A high definition, in focus video showing the malpractice by the police, shot by Yuen Long resident Ben, obtained for @HKFrontline - Acting Senior SP (Ops)(NTN HQ) Vasco Williams, that is not an ‘yellow object’ #antiELAB #ExtraditionLaw #HongKongProtests


The episode underlined a harsh reality in this global financial hub, once admired for its legal system and official transparency. 

With Beijing asserting increasing control over the city’s institutions and Hong Kong’s leader refusing to allow an independent inquiry into police behavior, authorities here appear not to fear the consequences of violating protocols intended to uphold the rule of law.
Instead, their approach this week was to obfuscate.
Asked Monday about the incident in Yuen Long, an outlying area of Hong Kong, acting senior superintendent Vasco Williams said footage showed an “officer kicking a yellow object,” not a man lying on the ground.
“We don’t know what that object is, but there are other videos that are more clear that show the entire incident,” he said. 

“And there’s no malpractice by the police whatsoever.” 

There was no assault, he added during a heated news conference.
The man shown in the video being kicked by police was a member of a group that deploys volunteers to negotiate between police and protesters at rallies, the group said. 

He was later arrested, local media reported.

Riot police stand guard behind a burning barricade after a protest march in Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, on Saturday. 

Williams conceded that the case warranted investigation but suggested that the video could have been “doctored” — an idea that was quickly debunked.
“Knowing you are being videoed, do you think any officer would be that stupid to assault someone under detention? I don’t think so,” Williams said. 

Hong Kong’s daily police briefings are carried by numerous news outlets and watched by thousands. Nearly as soon as Williams spoke, netizens pointed out that more than a month ago, two officers were arrested after being captured on security footage beating a 62-year-old man restrained in a hospital bed.
Shortly after the news conference, posts that appeared to be from Williams’s account on the job networking site LinkedIn were revealed, drawing even more negative attention to the police from those supporting the pro-democracy movement.
The account, which used the name Vasco W. and listed “Superintendent at the Hong Kong Police Force” as the job description, included derogatory comments about protesters, pro-democracy lawmakers and Hong Kong residents in recent months. 

Images of the posts were taken by The Washington Post before the account appeared to be deactivated.

Throughout the protests that have rocked the city, triggered by a now-shelved plan to allow extraditions to mainland China, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has refused to countenance an independent investigation into police tactics — one of protesters’ five demands.
Those tactics have become more forceful over recent weeks, with police making more than 1,550 arrests and deploying water cannons and stinging blue dye along with tear gas.
A report last week by Amnesty International accused the force of “reckless and indiscriminate” tactics, including torture, beatings and other mistreatment of detained protesters. 

The report followed criticism of the police by the United Nations.
Asked Tuesday how her government could rebuild trust in the police without a fully independent investigation, Lam said her backing of the force does not mean she “condones irregularities.” 

Lam has said the existing police watchdog has her “full support” to conduct fact-finding studies, but critics note that the body is headed by an official she handpicked, is packed with her associates and loyalists and is not authorized to call witnesses.
Pressed about the video of the “yellow object,” Lam said it would be difficult to opine on “what is right, what is wrong, what is true, what is fake, because there have been . . . different versions [of] the same incident.”
The police have been under extreme pressure, she said, adding it was “quite remarkable” that there have been no fatalities.

The protests represent a challenge to the authority of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who warned in 2017 that any effort to contest China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong was a “red line.” 

Although not an independence movement, the protests have come as Xi faces pressure on numerous fronts, including China’s trade dispute with the United States, a slowing economy, rising food prices, a recalcitrant Taiwanese administration and accusations of cultural genocide against the Uighur people and other Muslim minorities in China’s East Turkestan colony.
Chinese authorities appear particularly anxious for calm ahead of Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China. 

Protesters are planning to disrupt official events in Hong Kong, where the government has already canceled a fireworks show.
On Tuesday in Hong Kong, a pro-democracy lawmaker, Roy Kwong, was attacked by three masked men as he tried to get into his car. 

The trio kicked and punched Kwong and recorded the assault on video, according to other lawmakers from the democracy camp.
“The fact the attackers recorded the ambush leads me to believe that the attackers were paid to do this and the video would be needed as proof in order to get paid,” said James To, a pro-democracy lawmaker. 

“By beating him, it is sending quite an alarming signal that Hong Kong is a place without regard for rule of law.”