TY - JOUR
AU - Cho, Lok, Lee
AB - Abstract Using interview data from protesters and frontline police, this article examines the evolution of protest policing, from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ models, amid the recent unrest in Hong Kong. While ‘police-centric’ explanations in the protest policing literature tend to conceive of police as intentional decision makers who can choose among a variety of strategies, we employ a mixed embeddedness framework to find that a number of factors—external to police—have deprived the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) of its capacity to facilitate peaceful protest through ‘soft’ strategies of communication and negotiation. These include (1) a legitimacy crisis of governance in Hong Kong (a macro-level factor), (2) the erosion of police authority within the local political culture (a meso-level factor) and (3) stylistic changes in police–protester interactions, involving the increased use of masks and collective action frames of identification as victims of police (micro-level factors). Together, these factors have inaugurated reaction spirals which have led Hong Kong’s police–public interface to an unprecedented state of breakdown, where ‘soft’ policing is now all but impossible and where the HKPF is beset by a widely subscribed demand for its outright disbandment. Introduction Social movements that conduct highly visible protest actions can pose significant challenges to holders of state power, enabling otherwise powerless people to register complaints about state legitimacy (Tilly 1978; della Porta and Fillieule 2004). In such contexts, police often find themselves in the unenviable position of having to weigh one set of societal goods (relating to the importance of political expression) against another (relating to the maintenance of public order; Reiner 2010; Bowling et al. 2019). As such, police actions in protest situations are seldom inert: law enforcement responses to protest events can either reduce political tensions or, as it may be, exacerbate societal conflicts (Lipp 2015). Furthermore, because they are emblematic of law, policy and the political establishment, police themselves can become targets of social movement actions and, in a spiral of action and reaction, contribute to political processes that either bolster or erode governmental legitimacy (Tyler 2011; Hui and Au 2014). In extreme cases, the sway of police allegiance—from the ‘establishment’ to the ‘anti-establishment’ side—can determine the survival of political regimes. The policing of social protest has garnered a great deal of academic attention in democratic contexts. For example, using case studies of protest policing in Great Britain and on the European continent, della Porta et al. have produced a number of classifications relating to protest policing styles, from ‘tough’ styles that rely on an escalated force model to ‘soft’ styles that involve the negotiated management of protests (see della Porta 1995; della Porta and Reiter 1998; della Porta and Fillieule 2004). Smith (2012: 826) has discussed the strategy of ‘negotiated accommodation’ as a model for policing civil disobedience campaigns in liberal democracies. Gillham et al. (2013) analyzed the practice of ‘strategic incapacitation’ in public order events in United States during the post-9/11 era. In all of this work, the metric of differentiation among tactics—from negotiation to coercion—relates to the degree to which citizens, as political subjects, are to be engaged as rightful or legitimate participants in socio-political process. The give-and-take nature of protest policing is thus a moment when the ‘social contract’—so foundational to Western political theory—reveals itself to be ‘living’, subject to adjustment and reformulation in accordance with expressions of public will. While these previous studies have contributed valuable insights about the role of police in protest situations, little work has been done to examine policing dynamics in political contexts where social contact theory is less foundational to the political culture. We suggest that ‘hybrid regimes’—with Hong Kong serving as our exemplary case—offer a particularly interesting opportunity for examining the socio-political agency of police, precisely because they operate outside of ‘the usual’ political framework. Hybrid regimes are neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian, with people living under them enjoying only limited political rights and civil liberties (Wigell 2008; Gilbertand and Mohseni 2011). There is some reason to think that hybrid regimes are inherently unstable, and one scholar has noted that Hong Kong’s erstwhile stability has been somewhat of a curiosity, since ‘[t]he coexistence of democratic and authoritarian elements within a single political regime would usually be an inherent source of political conflict’ (Fong 2013: 856). Recently, Hong Kong has indeed been beset by episodes of turbulence that are increasing in severity and frequency. The Occupy movement (2014), the Mong Kok riot (2016) and the Anti-ELAB (Extradition Law Amendment Bill) protests (ongoing from 2019) all point to a situation where political actors, lacking regular channels of influence, are moving towards innovated, non-sanctioned, and increasingly illegal political tactics. In order to increase our understanding of protest policing in hybrid regimes, this article examines the evolving structure of protest policing in Hong Kong, specifically tracking the change of police strategies in handling social protest since the United Kingdom’s return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. As a Chinese territory that is meant to retain considerable political and cultural autonomy under the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, Hong Kong bears features that will be at least superficially recognizable to observers of modern liberal democracies. It has a representative legislative body called the Legislative Council (‘LegCo’) but only limited suffrage: 50 per cent of the seats are elected by popular vote from geographical ridings and 50 per cent are filled by ‘functional constituencies’—professional or industrial sectors that are generally pro-establishment in their orientation. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong is elected by a 1,200-member panel (also heavily pro-establishment) from a Beijing-approved list of candidates. Since the handover from the United Kingdom, Hong Kong has witnessed a growing number of protests concerning economic inequality, cultural autonomy and political enfranchisement (Ortmann 2016). Recent high-profile protest events have been motivated by the desire to increase democratic participation, including large-scale protests held on July 1 (the anniversary of ‘the handover’) every year since 2003, the ‘Occupy Central’ movement of 2014 and, most recently, the ongoing anti-extradition bill protests. Over this period, the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) has undergone a change in its style of protest policing, moving from rather ‘tolerant’, ‘soft’, or ‘flexible’ approaches to more ‘repressive’, ‘hard’, and ‘proactive’ methods. This article accounts for this change by arguing that several factors, from macro-structural to micro-interactional levels, have combined to place the HKPF in particularly fraught position vis-à-vis the protests in Hong Kong. Thus, while the ‘negotiation spectrum’ in the aforementioned literature offers an array of options for police departments and policy makers who operate in modern liberal democracies, the political reality of ‘hybridity’ in Hong Kong inverts the spectrum from one of various possibilities (involving ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches that are available for selection) to one of various impossibilities, where any action—hard or soft—can be credibly judged to be either ‘over-policing’ or ‘under-policing’, depending on one’s political stance. In such situations, police are beset by a vocational paradox: while they are increasingly being called upon to shoulder responsibility for dealing with political unrest, they are at the same time increasingly unable to be effective actors in social-protest environments. The macro-structural setting for such dynamics is easy to discern and describe. What is needed—and what we provide presently—is a data on the micro-interactional realities of policing in hybrid contexts. Using interview and observational data, this article delivers a granular depiction of the fraught state of protest policing in hybrid regimes. Theorizing Protest Policing Beyond ‘Police-Centric’ Approaches Past research on protest policing develops a ‘police-centric’ perspective, which emphasizes the importance of police knowledge—i.e. police perceptions and understandings of their own role in a context shaped by various political opportunities and movement characteristics. Such a perspective characterizes police as knowledgeable agents who act strategically, deciding which model of protest policing to apply (see della Porta and Reiter 1998). For example, when styling themselves as the ‘King’s police’—agents tasked with upholding the political establishment—police will tend to regard demonstrators as ‘trouble makers’ and as such employ an escalated force style that features dramatic shows of force, exhibits a disregard for constitutional rights, involves minimal communication with demonstrators, and employs mass arrests as a strategy (della Porta and Fillieule 2004). When viewing themselves as a ‘citizen police’ or as service providers whose legitimation comes ‘from below’, police will act in ways that are more accountable to communities and less accountable to political authorities, regarding demonstrators as rational claims makers and preferring to deploy a negotiated management model of protest policing characterized by a reliance on dialogue. As such, police will see themselves as facilitators of peaceful protest (della Porta et al. 2006). Thus, changes in self-understandings among police can lead to changes in policing styles. The ‘policing philosophy’ approach, as developed by Winter (1998) and Smith (2012), offers a different yet complementary explanation for differences in policing styles. According to Smith (2012: 827), underlying principles of police operations and the normative self-conceptions of police who inhabit their role serve as ‘important variables in shaping the attitudes and actions of police officers’ during protest events. In most existing research contexts, then, policing philosophies will tend to be reflective of a wider democratic legitimating structure such that police will view themselves as being facilitative of the peaceful dimensions of protest, adopting a strategy of ‘negotiated accommodation’ that at times even cooperates with civilly disobedient activities, assisting in the ‘commission of a protest that is effective as an expression of their grievance against law or policy’ (Smith 2012: 828). While these ‘police-centric’ explanations of policing styles have enjoyed considerable uptake as a framework for analyzing the policing of protest all over the world, there are limitations to its value for when studying protest policing in authoritarian and hybrid regimes. One reason for this is practical: because understanding police knowledge and its professional culture usually requires in-depth interviews with senior and frontline officers, these data are often inaccessible in non-democratic contexts. The perspective also assumes a modicum of independence on the part of police departments from political influence—something that frequently does not obtain in non-democratic contexts. Across all polities, however, we argue that the police-centric perspective tends to overemphasize the importance of police perceptions while minimizing social-interactional context in ways that produce one-sided explanatory frameworks. Viewing policing styles as a form of culture that is constituted by historical, political and interactional factors, this article develops an alternative, ‘mixed embeddedness’, perspective as a means of accounting for the evolution of protest policing in Hong Kong. The idea of embeddedness stems from Granovetter’s (1985) seminal work—originally within economic sociology—which has gone on to find relevance across the social sciences. In contrast to atomized-actor explanations for economic activity (among which we can count the aforementioned police-centric approaches), Granovetter argues that individuals’ choices for action are embedded in matrices of social relations that create expectational frameworks that condition the possibility for choice itself, constraining and allowing particular ranges of actions (Granovetter 1985: 481). Rather than conceiving of police as atomized actors who use their powers of observation and analysis to develop optimal strategies vis-à-vis protests, then, the mixed embeddedness approach conceives of policing styles as being refracted through history, politics, community relations and micro-level interactions with demonstrators in the protest context. To reflect this conception of mixed embeddedness, we differentiate our analysis across macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. Methods and Data Collectively, this research consists of 52 in-depth semi-structured interviews, observations of police–protester interactions and an analysis of news reports and relevant literature in both English and Chinese. The authors’ interests in the evolution of social movements and police’s changing strategies in handling social protest began in the wake of the 2014 pro-democracy ‘Occupy Central’ movement. P.W. and P.J. are university professors based in Hong Kong; they teach both undergraduate students (many of whom are themselves activists) and postgraduate students in a criminology program—many of whom are officials from local disciplinary forces. L.L.C. is a current postgraduate research student who was born and raised in Hong Kong. The social contacts possessed by the authors have thus provided many opportunities to conduct interviews with both protestors and enforcement officers and enabled them to gain a deep understanding of protest policing in Hong Kong. P.W. conducted six interviews immediately after the occurrence of what came to be known as the ‘Mong Kok Riot’ or ‘Fishball Revolution’ in 2016. Occurring during Chinese New Years’ celebrations, police attempts to clear unlicensed street vendors (who are regarded as symbols of ‘localist/nationalist’ identity in Hong Kong) led to violent clashes between police and protestors, resulting in injuries to roughly 200 police officers (Wong 2019). Interviews were conducted with a retired chief superintendent, a senior inspector, a frontline police officer, a researcher and a university student. These data provided key insights related to social unrest in the new, ‘Post-Umbrella’ phase of Hong Kong politics and also were illuminating with respect to why the police were seemingly unprepared for handling these new developments. During the 2019 anti-extradition movement, P.W. and L.L.C. conducted seven interviews with police officers and officials from other disciplinary forces in Hong Kong and one interview with a protestor. The data gained in this round were especially useful for understanding recent causes for the police’s change in strategy—from a ‘soft’ style to a ‘harder’ one—and the major challenges associated with such a change. P.J. started his project on Hong Kong’s social movement in 2017, collecting 38 interviews among people aged 16–30, all of whom have participated in social movements in Hong Kong. These varied from protesters who advocated civil disobedience and illegal tactics to those who have participated only in peaceful marches and organizing. The interviewees were questioned about their personal history of political involvement, their views on movement leadership and on their views about the future of Hong Kong as it moves toward 2047 (when Hong Kong’s formal autonomy from mainland China ends). The combination of these two sources of data—one ‘police-centric’ and the other ‘demonstrator-centric’—enabled the authors to develop a comprehensive view of protest policing in Hong Kong. Historical Backdrop: From Colonial Repression to ‘Soft’ Protest Policing The HKPF’s styles and strategies for protest policing have transformed along with different phases of governance over the course of Hong Kong’s history. From the formation of the HKPF in 1841 and up until the early 1970s, the HKPF served the colonial government as a classic paramilitary police force modeled on ‘the recognition of a hostile (usually indigenous) population ruled (usually by an alien colonial power) primarily by coercion with the threat of armed force’ (Chan and Lau 2017: 138). Maintaining public order—especially by policing riots and protests—was accorded a higher priority over other functions (such as fighting crime and providing community services; Jeffries 1952). In order to effectively suppress political activity that would threaten colonial rule, the police developed an escalated force model that featured a reactive implementation of law and the use of force to disperse protest activity (whether violent or non-violent) while exhibiting a low reliance on communication and bargaining. As Tsang (1995: 174) argued, the Hong Kong police were able to maintain stability ‘either by pre-empting major disturbances, politically inspired or not, or by containing and suppressing them efficiently once they started’. The police force was able to meet new demands and deal with emerging challenges through frequent reorganization initiatives and with improvements in equipment and general training. For example, after the Guangdong–Hong Kong strike of 1925–1926, organized by the Communist Party of China to challenge colonial rule, the HKPF established an Emergency Unit that enhanced its ability to tackle civil disturbances. They also formed the Anti-Communist Squad (renamed the Special Branch in 1938), tasking it with gathering political intelligence and monitoring left-wing political agitators (Fu and Cullen 2013). As a response to the ‘Double Tenth Riots’ of October 1956 (politically motivated riots involving fights between pro-Communist and pro-Chinese Nationalist factions that caused 60 deaths and 500 injuries), the HKPF established the Police Training Contingent to offer training on internal security and anti-riot measures, ensuring the police force’s readiness to respond to emerging threats to internal security and public order (Chan and Lau 2017). The Police Training Contingent became the Police Tactical Unit in the late 1960s. In 1967, the HKPF earned significant trust from the British government after it quelled a pro-communist uprising that began as a labour dispute and developed into a massive general strike and violent demonstrations (Yep 2008; Cheung 2009b). The Force’s firm suppression of local communists and its efforts to restore social order also led to increased recognition and support from the public, especially as a bombing campaign emerged to spread terror in the colony. The 1967 riots ultimately proved to be a turning point for the HKPF and for Hong Kong as a whole. Prompted by the unrest, the Force established the Police Public Information Bureau (later renamed the Police Public Relations Bureau) to improve police–public relations (Hong Kong Police College 2007). The colonial authority also decided to modify its governance style, concentrating on social welfare issues and poverty reduction as a means of addressing grievances that posed a threat to social stability. As a means of improving the colonial regime’s legitimacy, they also sought to reform the HKPF, which was, according to recent historical work, marked by deep corruption and abuses of power up until the early 1970s (Lo 1993; Kwok and Lo 2013). With the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in 1974, the colonial government sought to curb corruption among officials, especially in the police force, and end police collusion with local organized crime groups—measures that ultimately significantly increased the Force’s performance in crime fighting and law enforcement (Lo 1993; Scott 2013). By the mid-1980s, the HKPF had completed its reorientation and transformation from a colonial paramilitary force that was primarily focused on maintaining public order and internal security to a modernized police service that was professional and largely free of corruption (Jeffries 1952; Chan and Lau 2017). Public service reforms initiated by Chris Patten, the last colonial governor, aimed to promote a ‘customer service’ model for government providers—viewing users of public services as customers whose satisfaction is a key legitimating value (Cheung 2009a). Following Patten’s lead, the HKPF established its Service Quality Wing in 1994 and launched the Force Strategy on Quality of Service in order to develop a ‘customer-focused culture’ within the Force (Hui 1995). Consequently, the Force developed a softer strategy of protest policing (i.e. the negotiated management model): employing negotiation strategies and stressing communication efforts as a means of cooperatively facilitating demonstrations in ways that minimized the potential for disruption to public order. Amid this strategy, the importance of constitutional rights and freedoms was stressed and the use of coercive methods was restricted to a last resort. Since the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the HKPF has had to handle more frequent, large-scale and increasingly decentralized social protests that have shown an ability to develop innovative confrontation strategies, blocking roads and occupying public spaces (Ho 2013). The number of public order events increased from 247 in 1986 to 1,190 in 1997 and to 11,880 in 2018 (see Figure 1). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Number of public order events (Social Indicators of Hong Kong 2019). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Number of public order events (Social Indicators of Hong Kong 2019). Prior to the 2010s, the HKPF was, for the most part, able to maintain the non-coercive ‘customer service’ model established during Patten’s governorship. The HKPF policed political assemblies peacefully with ‘only pepper spray [being] occasionally used in local issue-related protest’ (Ho 2013: 12). Public order events had generally taken place peacefully amid mutual understanding, communication, and negotiations between police and protestors. As Lo (2016: 124) observed, frontline police officers were required to ‘exercise the use of force cautiously and to adopt the principle of “not using force but trying to use your mind”’. This was especially the case prior to the Occupy Central Movement in 2014, when a large-scale civil disobedience/sit-in campaign shut down large commercial and administrative sections of Hong Kong for 79 days. The negotiated management model (‘soft strategies’) for protest policing has proven increasingly ineffective in the latter half of the 2010s, however. It was significantly challenged by protesters during the 2010 movement against the construction of a high-speed rail line that would link Hong Kong with mainland China while displacing residents of the Hong Kong village of Choi Yuen Tsuen (Ho 2013). During the Occupy Central Movement in 2014, demonstrators’ growing distrust with the government had significantly changed their perception of the police who were seen as ‘a political tool’ employed by the unpopular government to repress pro-democracy activists.1 As a result, protestors adopted aggressive actions (e.g. jabbing at officers with umbrellas) and, in response, police used arrests (over 900) and tear gas to disperse the protestors. Given that the large and lengthy occupation ultimately ended without any deaths, one could argue that police actions, which combined soft- and hard-line tactics, were successful (Lo 2016). But as an exercise within civil society it was a failure: the movement ultimately ended in political frustration without any resolution of grievances or concessions from the government (Lee and Sing 2019; Pang 2020). The 2016 Mong Kok riot, which led to the injury of roughly 200 police officers, was another transformative moment in police–protester relations. At issue was the government’s crackdown on unlicensed food-stall hawkers who were selling traditional street food such as fish balls—a strong symbol of local Hong Kong identity. Deep distrust among young protestors towards the police meant that police officers were unable to strike a deal with protesters of the crackdown, and some localists decided to resort to violence against law enforcers (Wong 2019). Police commanders ordered frontline officers to confine their repressive measures to the use of pepper spray, which was far from sufficient to protect police officers from the attacks with bricks and other improvised weapons. According to interviews, tear gas was not employed to disperse the crowd because the use of tear gas on demonstrators during the 2014 Occupy Movement caused a public outcry.2 While the pro-democracy sector of the public criticized an officer for firing his gun in the air to ward of attacks, these events also generated demands within the force and within pro-establishment sectors of society for the adoption of ‘harder’ policing styles. Since these events, a comparatively harder strategy, relying on more coercive means or a combination of coercion and negotiation, has been implemented.3 For example, during the 2019 anti-extradition protests, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, bean-bag rounds and water cannons—all seldom used previously—have become commonplace on the streets of Hong Kong. On 24 December 2019, the Washington Post published a report showing that 16,000 rounds of tear gas had been used by police since 12 June 2019 (Mahtani et al. 2019). By contrast, only 87 rounds were used during the entirety of the 79-day Occupy Movement in 2014 (Yeung 2014). Macro-Level: A Legitimacy Crisis in Post-Colonial Hong Kong A century ago, Weber (1922[1978]) outlined processes through which legitimacy can be won or lost and showed how authority can be underwritten according to different logics of domination (Herrschaft). Sources of state legitimacy can be classified by ‘the ways in which state power can be justified: by a commonly accepted leader selection procedure; by services that a state provides; and by a promise to bring a better future’ (Yang and Zhao 2015: 70). Among these methods, democratic regimes are legitimized most often by way of ‘inputs’, from the body politic into political processes. These can involve durable procedures of public election, multi-party competition, and a general state of political liberty. Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, can be said to gain legitimacy ultimately by way of governmental ‘outputs’ involving credibly delivered measures of economic development, the provision of public services, and contributions to projects that increase national pride and impart a sense of grandeur on the international stage (see Minogue 2002; Zhu 2011). Hybrid regimes like Hong Kong thus can face significant challenges reconciling these ‘output’ and ‘input’ principles amid the conflictual coexistence of democratic and authoritarian modes of legitimation (see Levitsky and Way 2010; Mazepus et al. 2016). Legitimacy crises have been a significant challenge for the post-colonial Hong Kong government. On the ‘performance legitimacy/output’ side, worsening income inequality and a shortage of affordable housing have meant that an increasing share of Hong Kong’s population is finding it extremely difficult to maintain financial security. Hong Kong’s latest Gini coefficient rating (2016) was 0.539, the highest recorded in over four decades, making it the ninth most unequal country in the world (Wong 2018). Currently, 20.4 per cent of the city’s population are living below the poverty line.4 Moreover, Hong Kong has become far and away the world’s least affordable housing market, a position it has held for 9 years straight. On average, it would take 21 years of salary (spending on nothing else) to buy a home in the city compared with 12.6 years in Vancouver, the city that ranks second globally (Liu 2019). Despite the fact that the government provides heavily subsidized public housing to lower-income families, access is very limited, with the average waiting time for public rental housing being more than five years in 2018 (Ng and Su 2018). A widely held view among the general public is that the lower and middle classes are increasingly being cut out of Hong Kong’s economic opportunities amid collusion between government and business, especially between real estate developers and senior public officials (Wong 2010; 2015). This governing coalition with the capitalist class, while beneficial for some in the short run, has, over the longer term, had a ‘decentering’ effect within Hong Kong’s political economy (Lui and Chiu 2007). As such, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s evident decreasing capacity for governance points to an emergent structural weakness that cannot simply be explained as a function either of civil society’s increased political demands or as a result of specific leadership failures (ibid) but rather as a result of ‘the growing disconnection of the business sector from the local community’ (Fong 2013: 867). On the ‘input’ side, the Hong Kong government’s legitimacy has been weakened due to its unwillingness to implement universal suffrage in the election of the Chief Executive—something that was enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration5 and Article 45 of the Basic Law6 as an ultimate goal for Hong Kong’s political reform. In 2003,7 a social movement developed with the aim of speeding up the introduction of universal suffrage and, in 2007, the central government in Beijing finally promised to introduce it by 2017. But this promise was not realized due to several details of the electoral model proposed by the Chinese government in 2014, which were regarded by pan-democratic politicians as subverting the spirit of democratic reform (Chen 2016; Tai 2019). After the rejection of this initial proposal by the LegCo in 2015, there have been no new developments, and the suffrage movement seems to have been permanently stymied. The result has been a growing social divide and increasing public anger. A loss of political legitimacy, along both its ‘input’ and ‘output’ modalities, has thus largely deprived Hong Kong authorities of their ability to govern in ways that rely on generalized, consensual support for law. The Hong Kong people—especially pro-democracy protestors—have become increasingly uncompliant with the government and its police force, something that indicates that, against the backdrop of aforementioned macro-structural factors, legitimacy is often both realized and contested at the level of criminal justice institutions and interactions with its agents (Bradford et al. 2008). In order to provide an explanation of changes in protest policing from a mixed embeddedness perspective, we, therefore, need to consider meso-level features of trust relationships as they exist between police and the public—a task to which we turn presently. Meso-Level: The Erosion of Police Authority Two factors are particularly salient for understanding recent erosions of police authority in Hong Kong. First, the public increasingly views the police as having lost political neutrality. Second, the prevalent use of video and internet technologies has increased the visibility of police violence, leading to a re-evaluation of the moral status of police. Loss of police neutrality It is a truism of policing scholarship that political neutrality is fundamental to police legitimacy. In the Hong Kong context, this would mean that members of different political camps—whether pro- or anti-establishment—would be treated impartially when police officers implement policies, enforce the law, and deliver community services. Police officers we interviewed emphasized that, as individuals, they have remained neutral while discharging their duties.8 Recent events, however, have exacerbated longer-term trends (see Hui and Au 2014) in the erosion of public confidence in police. Particularly damaging was the ‘Yuen Long attack’—an incident on 21 July 2019 in which a group of at least 100 pro-establishment, white-clad men, some of whom were local gang members, attacked protestors arriving home after a demonstration (along with civilians who happened to be there) in the Yuen Long transit station. Despite receiving hundreds of emergency calls, local police officers arrived 35 minutes late and made no arrests in connection with the incident (Leung and Ting 2019). Moreover, Junius Ho, a pro-establishment politician and former head of the Hong Kong Law Association was videoed shaking hands with several white-clad men in the neighbourhood on the day of the attack. This event raised public suspicion of police collusion with local gangs as one former Royal Hong Kong Police officer noted: The Yuen Long attack, believed to have been conducted by local villagers and gangs of triad (criminal secret society) members, shocked Hong Kong and led to a widespread believe [sic] that the Police were in collusion with triads. This event turned a substantial number of the passive Hong Kong population against the Police, and many people started to label the Police as ‘haak ging’ (黑警), or ‘black police’ (Purbrick 2019: 473). Soon after, we heard chants of ‘Triads! Triads!’, issuing from protestors towards police at local rallies. Most police officers we interviewed were reluctant to make detailed comments about police inaction during the Yuen Long attack, but several did emphasize that they felt the conduct of the HKPF in connection with the event was shameful. For example: The Yuen Long [attack on] 7.21 (21 July) is something that I don’t want to comment [on], I ‘feel shame on the HKPF’ [as well].9 Um...It’s hard to comment what was happening on 7.21, I won’t say it was a wrong decision, but should have a better solution.10 The Yuen Long attack put so much shame on HKPF, it’s totally ridiculous.11 One frontline police officer was willing to be more candid, telling us that: The HKPF totally lose in this point [the Yuen Long attack]. There was no police to help or save citizens when they needed [help]. It was definitely a stain. Especially [when] two uniformed police officers had arrived on the scene but then turned away—that was a real shame… my colleague and his/her team went directly from Western district to Yuen Long, attempting to control the situation. However, they received an order asking them on hold. The upper level management team mentioned that the incident [the attack] was related to the gentry,12 [and to] let them deal with it in their own way.13 The HKPF’s seeming tolerance towards triad attacks on protestors confirmed to many within the public that they can no longer expect to receive impartial treatment from police. This event deserves to be recognized as a turning point of the 2019 anti-extradition protests in that it was at this moment that the police themselves became central targets of the movement as a whole (see Figure 2)—even, sometimes, among police officers themselves. As an enforcement officer mentioned: Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Police as political arch-enemies (author’s photos). Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Police as political arch-enemies (author’s photos). My Facebook has around 400 to 500 friends, many of whom are officials from disciplinary forces. Before the Yuen Long attack, 30% were anti-government and 70% were pro-government. But after the Yuen Long event, 70% became ‘yellow’ [i.e. pro-democracy and anti-government], including even enforcement officials…I saw that many of them shared information and news articles supporting social protest.14 Policing’s greater visibility and police legitimacy Before the late 1980s, the use of force by police was typically ‘visible only to those most chronically policed’ (Brucato 2015: 456). Recent decades, by contrast, have seen a dramatic transformation of the optical interface between police and society (Ericson and Haggerty 1997). The prevalence of camera phones has combined with the emergence of video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to enable populations to engage in collective projects of sousveillance (‘watching from below’; Thompson 2005; Goldsmith 2010). Ericson (1995) provides a useful dichotomy for conceptualizing this transformation: on the one hand, this expansion of police visibility increases police accountability; the extent to which police actions are subject to evaluation and judgment by the general public. Meanwhile, greater visibility decreases police’s account ability—namely, the capacity of police to justify their actions and shape their public reception (Ericson 1995; Mann et al. 2003). The existing literature on protest policing in Hong Kong attributes the erosion of police authority to a reversal of the stance, on the part of conventional media, from a pro- to an anti-establishment orientation. Chan and Lau (2017: 146) note e.g. that ‘the local media, from being generally pro-establishment before 1997, had post-1997 become one of the world’s most fierce critics of, even hostile to, government’. Especially, in the 2010s, however, developments in non-traditional reporting, combined with visual recording technologies, have arguably made a greater contribution to the (negative) visibility of policing. Anyone in the Hong Kong community during the last half decade (and especially during the latest wave of protests) has been exposed to, at times, daily streams of videos, captured by protesters and shared across Facebook, YouTube, LIHKG (a reddit-like message board) and Telegram (an anonymous messaging platform). Multiple protest sites (along with multiple vantage points of single sites) are streamed together over the same collective feed, often in a three-by-three grid.15 Instances of police brutality, illegality and unprofessionalism are clipped and circulated widely, and the sheer volume of this material, combined with the quantity of citizen contributor-curators, dramatically overwhelms any prospect for ‘account ability’ on the part officers (Ericson 1995). During the 2019 protests, new media practices were indeed a key vector for the spread of anger towards police, inaugurating and then exacerbating violent interactions between police and protesters. The collapse of trust in the formal legal system, along with increasing grievances among protestors, in turn, led to the widespread use of sil liu, a term put to use by protestors to refer to settling political disputes through private, extra-judicial punishments—at times directed against police themselves. Social media forums like LIHKG and encrypted apps such as Telegram have been used to share private information about officers and their families, facilitating the use of sil liu to resolve grievances. In a joint symposium hosted by the HKPF and a local university in October 2016, P.W. and a police superintendent had a discussion on the relationship between social media and police legitimacy. A common complaint among police officers has been that video clips of interactions between themselves and protesters are cut and framed in ways that emphasize police violence and downplay violence from protesters, prompting the author to pose a question about the possibility for a media counteroffensive: Q: ‘Why don’t police officers upload photos and videos online in a timely manner…to justify police use of force and safeguard the police’s image? A: ‘Unfortunately, we cannot do that. The evidence collected from CID [Criminal Intelligence Department] officers are used only for prosecution. If we want to disclose these evidences, like photos and videos, to the public, we need to go through a special procedure…. [W]e may need neutral and non-profit-oriented groups to do this instead…but we have not found it’.16 As Brucato (2015) has found, police agencies in many jurisdictions are indeed increasingly advocating for the use of body cameras as a means of pre-empting the asymmetrical use of video evidence whether in legal trials or the court of public opinion. Hong Kong police, however, have not adopted this practice. Thus, while the HKPF has remained tied to procedures that have their origins in the pre-social media age, protesters have been able to adapt to the new media climate, spreading and amplifying depictions of police violence. As a result, police attempts to counter new labels like ‘dirty police’, ‘triads’, ‘black police’, ‘dogs’, ‘murderers’ and ‘terrorists’ have been feeble and ineffective. Micro-Level: Spirals of Violent Action and Reaction These dynamics point to the importance of the micro-interactional level for understanding the evolution of protest policing in Hong Kong. As Newburn (2016: 137) noted, ‘the interactions between the police and “protestors” includes the ways both interpret the situations they find themselves in and the actions and reactions that both sides adopt towards each other’. This reciprocal perceptual dynamic has certainly been important in Hong Kong, where protests that are initially peaceful soon develop into an escalating spiral of invidiation and retaliation between police and the public. A key moment that sparked processes of mutual radicalization occurred during the attempted clearing of the Occupy Movement sit-ins of 2014. One interviewee recalled that a sense of comradery with fellow participants grew hand-in-hand with a developing sense that police were a key enemy on 28 September, a moment when organizers announced their civil disobedience campaign and when police responded with teargas. The transformation was visceral: I remember it was very hard because it was very hot. We were sitting close to together in rows in raincoats, feeling sticky… I had just pulled an all-nighter, so I felt like I was on the verge of having a stroke…. However, just when I was thinking to leave, feeling hopeless about the situation, I saw suddenly… there were people standing on the footbridge at the beginning [who] would throw us bottles of water, and I witnessed the moment of people pushing through the area that was closed off. When I saw a crowd of people pushing through, Wow!—at that moment, the feeling of someone’s got your back appeared again. I realized I was not the only one going through a tough time. There were many more coming out to support you for doing the right thing, so I shouldn’t give up easily. Then it was tear gas…. Everything was so chaotic. I couldn’t think…. We didn’t really know what they dropped on us. There were lots of smoke and we couldn’t see what or who was around us…. It was impossible to stay there as you may die. We all ran in the opposite direction of the gas…. I was angry at that time. It was fear before, but now it’s anger…. I mean we were all unarmed—why did they use such violent measures in driving away civilians protesting? They treated us like mobs, but we were peaceful protesters doing something for the good of HK. So I was especially mad at the cops… My friends were all furious and shouting at the police while staring them down…. That whole process was too, too draining, for me. But I was really angry.17 Another interviewee’s opinion of police changed dramatically after witnessing a particular encounter during a student strike that same week: the student told the police that he wanted to go toilet, but the police didn’t allow them…. So I took a plastic bag and told the police if they he could give the plastic bag to the student. But the police threw away the plastic bag, and walked in front of the student and said ‘if you want to go toilet, do it here’. I was very angry at that time, as he just wanted to go to toilet. You may forbid them to go, or you may arrest him if he committed any offense. But it wasn’t necessary to insult him. What’s the purpose for him to [relieve himself] in front of many people? It’s terrible. This is a scene that I will not forget, so my anger towards police would not [subside]…. While clearing out, those police would spray the pepper spray between and under the shields. These acts were very dirty. When you experience these, you would then know the political power and enforcement power...the enforcers were so dirty.18 Moments like these point to the micro-interactional basis for opinion formation in police–protester relations. The 2019 anti-ELAB movement has provided an intensive crucible for many more such encounters: a figure generated by The New York Times on 18 November 2019 shows key dates and their interlinks, which is helpful for understanding the impact of government policy or police actions to the development of the social movement in its first six months (see Figure 3). Rather than engaging in the obstreperous task of providing an overview of all of these events, we choose instead to examine this history with reference to two key factors that have altered the interactional basis for police–protester encounters: (1) the influence of face masks on the use of violence and (2) an increasing collective identification among protesters as ‘police victims’. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Timeline of Hong Kong protests (Wu et al. 2019). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Timeline of Hong Kong protests (Wu et al. 2019). Face mask and use of violence Face masks are increasingly used by both protestors and police officers to conceal their identities and protect themselves from tear gas and Molotov cocktails. Figure 4 illustrates significant developments in typical protester gear from the 2014 Occupy movement to the 2019 anti-extradition protests, where masking and other anti-surveillance strategies have taken on a central role. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide How the 2019 protestor’s gear differs from 2014's Occupy activists (above Duhalde and Huang 2019; below: author’s photo of a protest poster). Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide How the 2019 protestor’s gear differs from 2014's Occupy activists (above Duhalde and Huang 2019; below: author’s photo of a protest poster). Most protestors in 2019 did not wear face masks until after 12 June 2019. On that day, police employed tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray to disperse demonstrations near the Legislative Council and government headquarters. The readiness to use these methods shocked demonstrators, many of whom decided to wear protective face masks, goggles and gas masks in later protests.19 As a local university student told Amnesty International (2019): The first time I experienced tear gas was on 12 June [2019]. It was a very, very bad day. I was trying to distribute protective gear to protesters when tear gas was suddenly deployed at our first aid station. Tears poured uncontrollably from my eyes and I could hardly breathe. A further increase in the use of face masks occurred, ironically, in response to a face-mask ban introduced in early October by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who invoked controversial emergency powers enshrined in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.20 Based on the authors’ observations, after the ban, a vast majority of protestors started to cover their faces with black surgical-style masks in order to pointedly defy the face-mask ban. As an exercise in legitimacy, therefore, the action had completely backfired: before, law-breaking elements of the protests movement were largely confined to fringe ‘frontliners’ who were prepared to face arrest, should they be caught. Now, by virtue of their defiance of the mask ban, tens of thousands of protesters could be counted among the movement’s law-breaking constituency. This upsurge in newly concealed identities, in turn, facilitated participation in property crime, with many protestors vandalizing public facilities, police stations and China-linked property. As a local newspaper relayed: The masked mobs smashed banks, stores and bookshops associated with mainland China, trashed government buildings and started fires at the exits of several MTR [subway] stations as they continued their attack on the city’s railway operator for allegedly aiding police in their clearance operations (SCMP Reporters 2019). Social control theory suggests that external factors, such as close relationships, cultural norms and the cost of punishment, can explain why people obey rules and conform to societal expectations for behaviour (Hirschi 1969). Face masks, therefore, seem to have a disinhibiting effect: protected from identification by family, employers and the authorities, protesters are ‘released’—within the protest context—in ways that allow for behaviour that they would not do otherwise. The dynamics of masking have had a denaturing effect on the basis for police–public interactions in another way: while the use of masks can, at times, effectively protect individuals from arrest or being harmed by police violence, in general, their use generates the need for police officers to be more aggressive when making arrests, including chasing, tackling and occasionally beating protesters who fight back in attempts to escape without being identified. A large number of police officers also have begun to hide their identities during protest events using face masks and removing badge numbers from their uniforms (Lum 2019b). This has been justified as a means of preventing personal information leakage and protecting their family members from being harassed or threatened by radical protestors (‘sil liu’, mentioned above). As one constable told us, ‘I do not agree [to] hide identity during the duties, but I have no choice. All my colleague and senior ask me to act in this way. I can only follow the majorities’.21 Our interviewees emphasized that frontline officers in Hong Kong have been well trained to handle social protests, but they also noted that most frontline officers are young and that they lack experience with managing violent confrontations, specifically.22 Likewise with the case of protesters, the concealment of identity seems to have had a disinhibiting effect on the use of force, and authorial observations can confirm that masked police can occasionally now be seen goading masked protesters into confrontations, beckoning them with their billy clubs (Siu 2019). As one constable told us: I see that some frontline colleagues are over-use of force during the operations. I do not agree with their action. Most of the times, we could handle the situation in the better way but they chose the act in other way. For examples… kicking the protestor on street by more than seven polices is definitely not necessary…and scenes of stepping the protestor’s face on ground is extremely ugly. I totally do not understand why those colleague have to do so…Maybe it’s because they do not have to bear any responsibilities when doing such things…. [I]f my colleague did not hide their identity by covering their face, they [would] not dare to say ‘open a champagne to celebrate Chow Tse Lok’s death’23 and ‘I need to repeat the scenes of 4th June’24 for 100% sure.25 The masking and/or concealment of identity—on the part of protesters and police alike—seems, therefore, to be an important factor in the evolution of protest policing styles in Hong Kong (see Figure 5). Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Masking as a new protest theme. Also, police in riot gear without identification badges (author’s photos). Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Masking as a new protest theme. Also, police in riot gear without identification badges (author’s photos). Collective identity as police victims Social identity theory suggests that certain circumstances can ‘make a collective identity more salient and compel people to act as members of [a] group’ (Klandermans et. al, 2002: 235). As Newburn (2016: 131) observed in his work on the 2011 England riots, protesters can ‘experience a shift in their self-definition, away from unique personal attributes towards more generalized, group-based attributes’. We have indeed observed shifts in the movement that have led to the salience of a new style of collective identification; namely, as ‘police victims’. A key moment for collective identity formation came in the wake of an event in which a young woman’s right eye was seriously injured by a projectile. Demonstrators alleged it was fired by police during a protest outside a Hong Kong police station on 11 August 2019, and the image of the woman, crying in pain and with a bloodied and bandaged eye, quickly took on an iconic status within the movement. Participants began wearing their own ‘bloodied eye’ bandages and covering their right eyes at events, replicating the injured-eye ‘meme’ across movement culture. Several other examples exhibit this trend. On 8 November 2019, Chow Tsz-lok (mentioned above), a 22-year-old undergraduate student died at a local hospital due to a fall from a car park near an area of violent confrontation between protectors and police (Lum 2019a). Demonstrators attributed Chow’s death to a police dispersal operation that took place nearby (Marlow et al 2019) and called Chow a ‘freedom fighter’ while also calling police officers ‘murderers’. One of emergent slogans, ‘his name is Chow Tsz-lok, he just happens not to be your son’, serves to remind the public of Chow’s death and that everyone bears the potential for victimhood at the hands of police. Makeshift shrines to alleged ‘murder victims’ and deaths of movement participants have become a focal point for many participants within the movement. Figure 6 shows some variations of the victimhood theme. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Variations on the ‘blinded eye’ theme (above) and shrines to various other alleged victims within the movement (below). Left: Getty. Middle: AFP/Getty. In the Figure 6, the bottom images should credit (the four with memorial activities) to “author’s photos.” Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Variations on the ‘blinded eye’ theme (above) and shrines to various other alleged victims within the movement (below). Left: Getty. Middle: AFP/Getty. In the Figure 6, the bottom images should credit (the four with memorial activities) to “author’s photos.” Collective identification as ‘victims’ has thus become a key organizing principle for the movement, shifting the focus away from the broader public–government interface (where demands for democratic representation had taken center stage) and onto the more specific interplay between protesters and police. The widespread acceptance and promulgation of this identity marks a dramatic change in the public reputation of the police, which routinely now attracts the worst possible appellations (‘murderers’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘triads’). As a result, the mere presence of police officers at public events significantly triggers protestors’ law-breaking behaviors and leads to an escalation of violence. ‘Softer’ policing strategies, involving communication, negotiation and facilitation have become all but impossible, and there is no real choice for the police force but to move in the direction of coercive force, increasing the use of violence amid increasingly futile attempts to maintain social order and manage protests. This forms the violent action–reaction spiral that portends dire consequences for Hong Kong in the coming years. Conclusion While protest-policing strategies in democratic regimes (e.g. the United Kingdom, the United States and continental Europe) have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, this article contributes data and analysis of protest policing as it exists in the hybrid regime of Hong Kong. Past research on the evolution of protest policing tends to employ a police-centric explanation that foregrounds police knowledge and understandings of external realities (e.g. political opportunities and the characteristics of social movements). In a departure from these approaches, this article deploys a ‘mixed embeddedness’ perspective, showing how policing tactics, strategies and styles are historically, politically, contextually and interactionally constituted. Officers are not atomized actors, and they are not necessarily instilled with knowledge and ability that is apposite to developing best practices for handling social protests. Instead, as our case shows, the choice of protest policing styles can be largely constrained by external factors. As a hybrid regime, Hong Kong is particularly effective for highlighting the constraint-laden context within which police choices are often embedded. This is because contradictions inherent in hybrid systems provide flashpoints that can illuminate factors—from micro- to macro-levels—that give shape to police strategy. In recent times, and especially in the latter half of 2019, the non-viability of Hong Kong’s political system has increasingly revealed itself. A growing legitimacy crisis has emerged, spurred by the government’s failure to deliver ‘outputs’ (e.g. economic growth and public services) and its concomitant refusal to accept greater ‘inputs’ through democratic reform. At the cusp of the crisis is diminishing police legitimacy, resulting from a perceived lack of political neutrality and the emergence of a civil-sphere culture which defines the police as an odious force. Amid the deterioration in police–public relationships, members of the public have become increasingly unwilling to cooperate with the police and comply with the law, leading to an action–reaction spiral that has increased violence on all sides. The use of face masks—among protesters and police alike—has allowed actors to escape normative and legal constraints that would ordinarily be in operation, and the development of social movement iconography-related police brutality and victimhood has foreclosed the possibility for non-coercive and non-authoritarian styles of policing. Funding This work was supported by a grant from Early Career Scheme (ECS) by the Research Grants Council (RGC) in Hong Kong (Project Code: 27615017). Footnotes 1 Interview 39 (senior police inspector) February 2016. 2 Interview 40 (retired senior police officer), February 2016; interview 41 (frontline police officer) March 2016. 3 Interview 46 (senior police constable) December 2019; interview 47 (senior police inspector) December 2019. 4 ‘Poverty situation’, Census and Statistics Department, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 2019. 5 The Sino-British Joint Declaration (the 1984 treaty) is an international treaty signed between Britain and China. The treaty states that under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework, the city would retain a high degree of autonomy and its legal and judicial system will remain unchanged for 50 years. The basic policies are detailed in an annex and stipulated in the Basic Law. 6 The Basic Law is Hong Kong’s ‘mini-constitution’, which came into effect at the handover in July 1997. 7 Since 2003, Hong Kong started its wide and deep discussions about constitutional reform concerning the election of the Chief Executive and all LegCo members through universal suffrage, and Hong Kong People believed that universal suffrage could be realized in the year 2007 or 2012. 8 Interview 39 (senior police inspector) February 2016; interview 46 (senior police constable) December 2019; interview 48 (senior police inspector) December 2019; interviews 49 and 50 (police constables) December 2019. 9 Interview 46 (senior police constable) December 2019 10 Interview 48 (senior police inspector) December 2019 11 Interview 47 (senior police inspector) December 2019. 12 The local village establishment, in which triad societies exercise considerable power. 13 Interview 49 (police constable) December 2019. 14 Interview 48 (senior police inspector) December 2019. 15 For an example of such formatting, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRZwSkORWk0&t=7s. 16 Informal interview, police superintendent, October 2016. 17 Interview 17 (protester), December 2017. 18 Interview 28 (protester), January 2018. 19 Interview 46 (senior police constable) December 2019; interview 48 (senior police inspector) December 2019; interview 47 (senior police inspector) December 2019; interview 49 (police constable) December 2019; interview 51 (police constable) December 2019. 20 Last used in 1967, the ‘Emergency Regulations Ordinance’ came into effect in 1922 as a measure that the colonial government could use in order to restore public order. 21 Interview 51 (police constable) December 2019. 22 Interview 41 (frontline police officer) March 2016; interview 48 (senior police inspector) December 2019; interviews 49, 50 and 51 (police constables) December 2019. 23 A protester who had recently died (discussed in the next section). 24 This refers to the events in Tiananmen Square, 4 June 1989. 25 Interview 50 (police constable) December 2019. 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TI - The Evolution of Protest Policing in a Hybrid Regime
JF - The British Journal of Criminology
DO - 10.1093/bjc/azaa040
DA - 2020-05-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-evolution-of-protest-policing-in-a-hybrid-regime-HUIcKook6Z
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -