The police appear to be having a laugh. In an Orwellian re-writing of history, officers last week arrested Democratic Party legislator Lam Cheuk-ting and several others for rioting during the mob attack inside Yuen Long MTR station in 2019, and claimed that both sides were equally responsible for the violence.

I had intended that this week’s column would be something a little different to more officialdom-bashing, something more upbeat perhaps. But the rationale for Lam’s arrest is simply too extraordinary to ignore.

For the police to say that the violent attack on July 21 was the result of two equally matched sides provoking each other is just a sick joke. A huge volume of mobile phone footage shows people being attacked at random by masked stick-wielding thugs. A live-streaming reporter was among those beaten up. That many of those present in the station were returning from a demonstration earlier in the day does not mean they were “evenly matched.”

The attackers even chased their victims them into a train, and continued their bloody assault with steel rods and rattan canes inside carriages, where more bystanders were caught up in the melee.

A video taken slightly earlier shows Lam Cheuk-ting calmly warning people in the train station not to go outside as there were lots of triad gangsters and they had already started causing trouble and were beating people up. He later suffered a fractured hand and required stitches to a mouth wound as a result of the beatings inside the train. Yet the police claim Lam’s presence inflamed the situation and that he is therefore guilty of rioting.

Well we are truly through the looking glass on that one – unless the police have evidence so far unseen by the rest of the world.

The police are now claiming that the mountain of video evidence doesn’t give the full picture. Curiously, they may be right – but not in the way they intended. One of the complaints leveled at the force was that they were too slow to react when violence broke out in the station, and they subsequently failed to go after those responsible. The police have denied these allegations. But analysis of hours of video footage by the New York Times shows officers slowly walking out of the MTR after the attack had started. The police said the two went to get backup. However, when the backup finally did arrive about 40 minutes later, they did nothing to go after the white-shirted attackers.

Indeed videos show some of the assailants calmly walking past police vehicles and officers after they had left the scene. The police later claimed that when they went to look for the attackers in nearby villages, they couldn’t find any suspects. No arrests were made that night. Yet footage taken by RTHK clearly shows officers talking to white-shirted men holding sticks. You can’t really get more suspicious than that.

Lam and his Democratic Party colleague Ted Hui have also been arrested in connection with a separate rally in Tuen Mun last year. While it’s possible they may be legally culpable for some of those charges, the rioting allegation is simply ridiculous.

It will be illuminating to see how the courts treat the matter when the hearing begins next month.

(Alex Price is a journalist who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over 30 years.)

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