tim's experiment

Another item for the annals of Hong Kong law enforcement. Last week police arrested two kids, ages 13 and 15, following a fracas on a basketball court.

The original crime was committed by a group of teenagers who were playing basketball on the court in Wong Tai Sin. This could be interpreted as a violation of the “no larger gatherings than two” rule, and moreover some of them – it was credibly reported in the Standard – were not wearing masks.

“Three plainclothes officers arrived at the scene,” the report continues, “to find that most of the teenagers had left, except for the 15-year-old and his 13-year-old brother. Sources said the two refused to leave, as they wanted to retrieve their basketball, which was stuck on the hoop.”

The elder brother then got into a verbal argument with the officers, which in due course escalated. He was arrested on charges of assaulting police. Video apparently shows him pinned to the ground and resisting. He was later released on police bail.

According to his father the boy was later found to have injuries to his face, chest and hands. Basketball is a rough game these days, it appears.

There is an interesting legal point here. Clearly the original game was a possible violation of the anti-COVID rules. On the other hand all the players except the two ball owners had either left or did so when the police arrived.

So it would appear that at that point no offence was being committed. Two people is the limit. The remaining two were perfectly entitled to remain on the scene to retrieve their ball, or for any other lawful purpose. You have to wonder why the cops concerned thought it necessary to have any interaction with them at all.

Later police statement: “The 15-year-old became emotional when officers stopped and searched him, leading the teenager to assault two officers with his hands.” So there was a stop and search? What, one wonders, was the justification for that? At what point did the officers say they were officers? Did they show a warrant card or two?

Well no doubt all this will be a matter for a magistrate, if it gets that far. The thing that set off my bullshit detector was the “three plainclothes officers”.

I have personally been the subject of occasional public complaints, a normal hazard for Hong Kong bagpipers. The police people who turned up were invariably polite, friendly, sympathetic … and in uniform.

It is nice to know that police take complaints about violations of the COVID rules seriously, but difficult to believe that even in these manpower-stretched days the normal response is to borrow three detectives from the CID.

Was this, one wonders, a case in which the complaining “members of the public” were also the investigating officers? 

Whatever the truth of these matters it seems there are a couple of principles which our hard-stretched law-enforcers may be neglecting.

The first one is that the default rule for interactions between the police and the public is and must involve the policeman or police woman being in uniform. We all understand that there are occasions and purposes for which the uniform is unnecessary and even impossible, but the general rule should be that a police person looks like a police person.

If the police person is not so uniformed, it would be nice to think that the production of a warrant card at the outset was a must. Nice, but a bit optimistic. I noticed in another case last week a young man arrested by a plainclothes policeman explained his reluctance to be arrested as being the result of the arresting individual’s repeated refusal to show his warrant card. The magistrate dismissed asking to see the card as a “way of wasting time”.

Similarly in the case of Samuel Bickett, still sub judice so we shall not go into details, the magistrate was quite happy to make up excuses for a policeman in plainclothes who had not only refused to show his warrant card but repeatedly denied he was a member of the force.

This sort of thing is not conducive to warm police-public relations.

So, uniforms if possible, please. It must follow, I think, that when a police person is not in uniform he or she should show considerable restraint in attempting activities which involve potentially abrasive interactions with unsuspecting members of the public. People do “become emotional” when subjected to duress by strangers. Law-abiding citizens respect the uniform.

Of course we all understand the merits of the saying that “a policeman is never off-duty”. We do not expect off-duty or plainclothes police to stand idly by if they come across a bank robbery or a murder in progress. But children playing on a basketball court?