tim's experiment

I know the police are only doing their duty in the way they’ve been trained to do, and it’s a tough job and they’d really rather be chasing real criminals, etc. etc. which is all true. Having said which I think it says a lot, and none of it nice, about the way Hong Kong is policed that people turning up for avowedly peaceful demonstrations arrive not fearing but expecting to be subjected to pepper spray and tear gas. Nobody has suggested for a moment that the demonstrators being threatened with rubber bullets as I write were going to destroy property, attack police or get into street fights with counter-demonstrators. The escalating levels of violence are all down to law enforcement.

There is no mystery as to why this takes place. It used to be said that the Army is always preparing to fight the last war. The Hong Kong Police Force is still busily preparing to deal with a kind of riot we haven’t seen since the 1960s. Every police person, at some point in his or her career, attends a residential course in the New Territories. This takes months and is conducted at enormous expense in a complex specially intended for the purpose. And the training is in “public order” work. It involves the full panoply of riot control technology. Trainees learn how to handle shields, batons, helmets, gas grenades, shotguns (rubber bullets for the firing of) and the ubiquitous pepper spray. They wave the banners, fire the chemical weapons, charge simulated rioters (who are played by other police people with a certain understandable zest) and clear them from the scene. This equips them to make an invaluable contribution to the sort of confrontation which used to erupt on the street of Northern Ireland or even, occasionally, in the less salubrious parts of English cities. It is totally inappropriate to the problems presented by a few hundred students engaged in an unauthorised demonstration on a Sunday afternoon.

It is nice to know that if we ever have a real riot our police are well equipped to deal with it. In real riots cars are torched, shops pillaged, and police lines pelted with bricks and petrol bombs. In such circumstances a resort to counter-violence is not just defensible but necessary. The forces of order clear the street, and we all applaud their courage and dedication. When the street is filled with peaceful demonstrators with their hands in the air, on the other hand, a different approach is called for, and a barrage of pepper spray is not it. I notice with dismay that the delivery of pepper spray has changed. It used to come in a little aerosol like the ones carried by nervous ladies on the streets of American cities. You held up the gadget and it sprayed the stuff in the face of anyone within about six inches of it. This has now been supplemented by a sort of hose pipe which can be deployed in the second rank of the police phalanx and squirts spray in industrial quantities in the general direction of the opposition. I do not think this is an improvement.

We all wonder what is going on behind the scenes here. Have the police been instructed to “crack down” on particular activities, groups or individuals? Is Lufsig relaying instructions from elsewhere for a firm hand? Or are we just witnessing paramilitary fantasies being played out in the streets? When I was a post-graduate student I attended lots of demonstrations for research purposes. I never saw a helmet with a visor, a gas mask or a shield. I never got so much as a whiff of tear gas or pepper spray. Policemen in their usual uniforms prevented access to places which they had been assigned to protect, and arrested demonstrators who went over the top in their efforts to get in. Keeping demonstrations peaceful sometimes required a serious effort. I remember an occasion when the Commissioner of Police for London ran — not walked but ran — across Grosvenor Square to urge the leaders of a procession to keep moving as they passed the American Embassy because it is an axiom of crowd control that if the leaders of a procession slow down there will be problems behind them.

This is not the way things are done in Hong Kong. The government does not talk to its critics and the police do not talk to their demonstrators. So we get last night’s scenes. Pepper spray and tear gas are no joke. They are chemical weapons within the meaning of the relevant international treaties. They are supposed to provide a non-lethal alternative to opening fire with real bullets, not the first resort if curious passers-by refuse to go home. Do we have a police force or an occupying army? Not my decision.