tim's experiment

It is beyond dispute that the tragedy in Manila was a tragedy. Grief is fully justified. Frustration with the local police is equally understandable, but perhaps less justified.

Should such an unhappy event take place in Hong Kong we will have to consider ourselves very lucky. Because it seems that everyone and his dog in this town, from Donald Tsang downwards via various pundits, columnists etc. to the man in the street. is an expert on the way in which such problems should be handled. The consensus among local talking heads is that the attempts to rescue the hostages were bungled, the police were bumbling, and this is why the whole thing ended in tears. Comparisons with the Keystone Cops were commonplace. The Phillipines, we were told, was a hotbed of corruption and incompetence, and that was why it should be punished with a government-organised travel boycott for not having a well-organised police force like ours, in which deranged cops only shoot themselves or — occasionally — each other.

The one thing which all these commentators have in common is, if you will excuse a blunt expression, ignorance. How many of us have watched live coverage of a hostage situation lasting several hours, after all? Answer, probably, none. We know that as hostage rescues go, having half the hostqages killed doesn’t count in anyone’s training manual as a success. On the other hand having half of them rescued more or less unharmed is a distinct improvement on the worst possible outcome. Nobody learns anything about hostage rescues from news programmes, because on news programmes time moves very quickly. If the drama lasts an hour, or a week, you will only see 30 seconds of it: the SAS man swoops through the window, stun grenades pop distantly, the triumphant prime minister says a few words and it is on to the next sensation.

Conseqnently, I fear, most of us get our idea of what a hostage situation should look like from on-screen dramas of one kind or another. The problem with this is  that they follow the rules for drama, which go roughly like this: the situation has to be sorted out in 90 minutes; the hostages, unless extremely obnoxious, must survive; the hostage taker, unless extraordinarily sympathetic, must die; the hero, who is usually a policeman, will unerrringly make the right decisions. This is not because scriptwriters are dishonest, it is because time is money, viewers are easily bored, and they have to meet the standards set on other programmes. When do you ever see the hero go round the block in search of a parking place? He doesn’t, because there isn’t time for that sort of thing. What comes next has to come next.

The consequence of this long period of media training is that most people have no idea what a real hostage taking should look like. I have no idea either, but knowing your limitations is important. Some things – like construction sites and slaughter houses (or, to use the American euphemism, meat packing plants) – look a mess even when they are working properly. Others, like the annual meetings of listed companies, look smooth and well-organised even if  the underlying reality is chaotic.  You have to wonder what the people who are complaining about the performance of the Manila police are comparing it with. Would they rather have German efficiency? At the Munich olympics all the hostages died. Would they rather have the Brits running things, and have innocent foreigners blown away in the underground? Or should we call in the Yanks, and hope we don’t get the people who were in charge at Waco? I get the distinct impression that what most commentators really want is not the SAS or the Navy SEALS or the Los Angeles SWAT team or the Russian Spetznaz. What they want is Keanu Reeves.

Some of the complaints were clearly of cosmetic matters. One columnist complained that some of the Manila policemen were overweight. Another thought the hammer used on the coach windows disappointingly domestic. Oddly enough the only person I met who did not complain about the Manila police was a Hong Kong police person who might find himself in charge of a similar event here, if we are so unfortunate. His only comment was “There but for the grace of God go I.”  It is about time people recognised that hostage situations are unpredictable, difficult and do not always have happy endings. The Manila police may not be the bees’ knees of law enforcement. But they could be seen approaching a bus containing a homicidal lunatic armed with an M-16. Those of us who are not up for such dangerous activities would do well to shut up.