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This paper is an in‐depth analysis of community policing in Hong Kong. It includes an outline of the evolution of community policing in Hong Kong, identifies the structural arrangements for the practice of community policing, examines major community‐based programs that have been launched, evaluates the performance of this strategy, and considers constraints on these policy initiatives. It shows that this community effort has already gone beyond the confines of promoting community relations in Hong Kong. The results have been encouraging. They include a significant improvement in the quality of police‐public interactions, the engagement of the public and their increased support in crime control and prevention, and the beginning of the conversion of traditional police enforcement to that of police services. However, the Force's use of community policing schemes predominantly for the pragmatic purpose of crime control has accounted for the lack of breakthroughs in forging a strategic partnership with the public to promote a secure and harmonious environment.

The purpose of this paper is to study police powers and accountability from a comparative perspective in both China and Hong Kong.

This paper compares and contrasts police powers and accountability.

The implications are many, including different political systems in which China is more authoritarian or paternalistic whereas Hong Kong is more pluralistic; checks and balances mechanisms in Hong Kong are far greater than in China; and the concept of accountability to the public is different in that Hong Kong police are accountable to members of the public but the mainland Chinese police force has a limited and top-down concept of accountability.

An original comparative approach to policing in Hong Kong and China.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between police legitimacy and protest policing with reference to the case of Hong Kong.

This study will review the concepts of police legitimacy and protest policing and examine the evolving policing practices in Hong Kong since 2010.

The study argues that the increasing polarisation of society could render policing protest a potential source of problem for sustaining police legitimacy.

This is a pioneering study that looks at the interplay between police legitimacy and protest policing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of demands from three life domains: society, workplace and family and different resources at the individual, family and supervisor levels on occupational stress and work engagement among Hong Kong police officers.

A survey based on a random sample of 514 male and female police officers was conducted, and multivariate regression was employed to assess the effects of demands and resources on work stress and work engagement.

Family–work conflicts, organizational and operational factors affected work stress and work engagement among police officers. Constructive coping was found to be positively related to work stress and negatively associated with work engagement.

Survey data collected from a single Chinese city may not be generalized to officers in other parts of China or Chinese societies with different social and political contexts.

The present study filled the knowledge gap about factors influencing police stress and engagement. This study provides insights into how to establish relevant contextual measures to reduce police work stress. This study represents one of the first attempts to use a random sample of police officers for the investigation of police stress in Hong Kong.

The purpose of this study is to gain an “insider” understanding of contemporary methods and operations in parallel trading in the North District.

Drawing from in-depth interviews and field observations, we explore how this demand has led to two major consequences.

First, contemporary parallel trading has resulted in the rise of an organized system with coordinated roles and a range of workers moving in concert colloquially understood as the ant-moving-home (“螞蟻搬家” or “maangai bungaa”) approach. Second, the demand for parallel goods has led to alterations in the border landscape disturbances to daily order, shortages of daily goods and rising prices which, in turn, have led to organized protests around political identity and new challenges for policing the border.

Our objective is to gain an “insider” understanding of contemporary methods and operations in parallel trading in the North District. A second limitation is the problem of generalization. Given the relatively small number of interviews and limited time for field observations, this study cannot provide a generalized account of the operation of the grey economy in the North District.

This article has drawn from several data sources to construct a holistic understanding of parallel trading and the associated public disorder in the North District. While parallel trading exists in many other countries, the situation in Hong Kong is somewhat distinct, in part, because the border trading site involves “one country but two systems” and accordingly is associated with other problems in relation to public security, social disturbance and identity conflict. These newly emerged issues on policing, not covered in this study, are important to future research.

In late April 1973, Charles P. Sutcliffe, the Commissioner of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force (RHKPF), received confidential information that Chief Superintendent Peter F. Godber, Deputy District Police Commander for Kowloon, was remitting money abroad. This information was transmitted to James J. E. Morrin, the Director of the Anti-Corruption Office (ACO), for investigation. By the end of May 1973, investigations by the ACO officers revealed that Godber had deposited in Hong Kong banks or remitted overseas HK$650,000 (US$128,332) since 1968 (Blair-Kerr, 1973a, pp. 3–4).

The purpose of this paper is to review the strategic planning process of the Hong Kong Police Force (the Force) and its outcomes for the planning cycle of 2019-2021.

Based on an insider's perspective drawn from documentation, internal reports and field observation, this study is an analysis of the five-step strategic planning process of the Force as a case study over the two-year period by using the 3-H (Heart-Head-Hand) framework and futures studies.

This study demonstrates the Force's strategic management in practice. The 3-H framework and the Six Pillars Foresight Process are found to be useful tools in strategic planning. When the Heart, Head and Hand elements are developed and integrated as a mindset during the process, they help theorise the practice and experience of police officers towards a holistic and effective strategic management. Coupled with the foresight process, the Force will be more agile and outward focused in the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world.

This is the first study to apply the 3-H framework and futures thinking in analysing the process in a police organisation in Hong Kong. While strategic planning is an important process to set directions for an organisation to move forward, this study describes the process in terms of relevant practice and theoretical concepts. It is hoped that such experience can serve as reference for practitioners in other government departments and police organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the development and implementation of the “values‐driven competency‐based performance management system” (VDCBPMS) and report the findings of a study that aims to examine the effect of the new PMS on officers of the Hong Kong Police Force.

The research focuses on the officers’ perceptions and attitudes resulting from the intervention and hypothesizes that the new system will increase their organisational commitment and job satisfaction, job‐effort and value alignment with the Force, as well as overall performance of the Force through enhanced performance of individual officers. The study employs a staff survey and interviews with a cross section of officers in different ranks to examine the impact on them of VDCBPMS.

The research findings reveal evidence to support all the hypotheses and their implications for management are outlined.

The research is not a done in a “before‐and‐after” fashion due to inherent limitations and the findings cannot be isolated from other clandestine management initiatives for examination due to practical limitations.

The research findings provide food for thought for the management to consider how best to improve the performance of officers in the Force.

The research findings suggest ways to improve policing in Hong Kong, which ultimately will benefit the society of Hong Kong at large.

This research fills a void in the literature of competency‐based PMS by introducing the “values” dimension to the notion, and contributes to the study of public policy implementation by illustrating how a novice system is developed and introduced in a policing context.

The purpose of this paper is to assess senior citizens’ satisfaction with police in Hong Kong. It is intended to answer four research questions: are older citizens satisfied with Hong Kong’s police? Do older citizens coming from different communities with variations in income and crime rates differ from other older citizens in their assessments of the police? to what extent can the respondents’ instrumental, expressive, and legitimacy concerns predict their satisfaction with the police? And is there variation in the predictive power of different kinds of concerns (instrumental, expressive, and legitimacy) on respondents’ satisfaction with fairness, integrity, and effectiveness (respectively)?

Findings of the study were based on survey interviews a sample of 1,061 elderly people aged 65 or above in 2013. A multiple-step sampling method was used to collected data from four types of communities according to the household income level of the residents and the community fraud crime rate.

The paper provides empirical insights about how senior citizens rate their level of satisfaction toward the police. Chinese elderly people’s assessment on the police is found connected with their instrumental, expressive, and legitimacy concerns as well as their educational attainment.

Several limitations were acknowledged. First, the self-reported data in this study contained bias because of possible distortion in memory. Second, the cross-sectional data used in this study means that causal inferences are difficult to make. Third, the findings from the study have a limited generalizability because data were collected from a small and non-random sample.

Since better educated senior citizens are found more critical when rating police effectiveness in fighting crime, police officers may need to think of suitable channels to understand the expectations of the better educated elderly people and to absorb their ideas for improving policing practice.

This study is probably the first attempt of assessing the satisfaction with police of a specific target group, i.e. senior citizens in Hong Kong.

This paper aims to examine the development of graffiti in Hong Kong. Based on cultural criminological theories, the study looks at graffiti from the cultural verstehen perspective (Ritzer, 1996) – giving voice to graffiti writers, instead of focusing on how the police or the general public react to the graffiti issue. The research also examines the motives of those writers and whether they perceive graffiti as an act of vandalism or an expression of an art form.

Graffiti is still an underdeveloped research topic in Hong Kong, which is absent not only in the mainstream discourse, but also in mainstream arts. It merely catches the media’s attention when graffiti are associated with political struggles. Thus, this paper aims to bridge the gap between the existing literature reviews and the graffiti development in this cosmopolitan city. In particular, it gives voice to graffiti writers to let readers understand how this hidden group of people perceive the notion of graffiti within their own subcultural discourse – and, at the same time, how the public responds to those graffiti-writings.

The research project, to a certain extent, manifests similarities to the literature reviews at an international level, especially the graffiti studies in London and New York. There are similarities in the graffiti styles – tags, bombs and pieces – and also in terms of the meanings carried behind graffiti-writing in public spaces, which showcase power through occupying space and its association with commercialization. Nevertheless, graffiti in Hong Kong have certain unique features, particularly as regards the official response to graffiti and the linkage of graffiti with politics. As seen in the Umbrella Movement and the Ai wei-wei incident, the legal responses were rigid and efficient, showing that the government paid great attention to the messages delivered in these cases. When no complaints or reports are made to the police, graffiti work is left undisturbed. Only when strong political messages are carried will prompt action be taken.

Graffiti are an underdeveloped research topic in Hong Kong, which is absent not only in the mainstream discourse but also in the mainstream arts. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the existing literature reviews and the graffiti development in Hong Kong. It gives voice to graffiti writers to let readers understand how this hidden group of people perceives the notion of graffiti within their own subcultural discourse and how city dwellers respond to those graffiti-writings.