On September 6, three police officers pounced on a twelve year old girl and pressed her flat on to the ground when she was escaping in a scud. One of the policemen knelt down at the waist of her petite body. Reportedly, the young girl was going to buy art supplies with her family members for school lessons. A few days later, Ip Kin Yuen, the LegCo member from the education functional constituency, wrote to Tang Ping Keung, the Commissioner of Police, urging him to explain and apologize for the event.

Excessive use of violence by the police is not news. One week before the incident on September 9, a pregnant woman had been pushed over by another police officer. Though wantonly toppling people over, intimidating people with words and antagonizing people with foul language have already become “standard practice” of Hong Kong police, that scene was literally too despicable. How could professionally trained police officers push a little girl over in such a violent manner? The police said afterwards that was the minimum force necessarily used, which is absolutely nonsense!

As police officers, they should have pondered why the little girl was so frightened when she saw the policemen. That was virtually the result of the police being more and more impervious to reason at the expense of their image. Sadly, they still stubbornly refused to admit their mistake by resorting to sophistry.

Yip points out that the police officers' decision to fix the little girl on to the ground with bended knees without appropriate grounds in advance for suspecting her of acting in violation of laws, which caused injury to her, might be a breach of the Police General Orders. However, the letter of response from the Police Force does not directly answer the query, but remark the same old same old, saying that they have to decisively enforce the law whenever people assemble without elaborating on the brutish operation against the little girl.

This paragraph was added to the letter of response: “As the representative of the education functional constituency at the LegCo, Councillor Yip should set a good example with his own conduct, denouncing those in defiance of sanitation and public order for breaching the law, and calling for minors to stay away from high-risk scenes of demonstration in order to ensure their safety”. In other words, they do not admit to any misjudgement made by the police, but conversely denounce Councillor Yip for not setting a good example with his own conduct. Such fallacious reasoning is found in a letter signed and endorsed by the Commissioner of Police, which suggests how depraved Hong Kong Police Force is. This is actually a tendency in which the inferiors imitate the superiors! It is as plain as a pikestaff that a blunder was committed in the public eye, yet the villains accuse their victim of misconduct. Has that become the standard mindset of the police? Can the police act in defiance of the law and discipline, doing whatever they want at will with impunity?

If the police had not committed any blunder, they should not have rewritten the incident of toppling a pregnant woman over on August 31 as “someone fell down”. In fact, with the invariable support from Beijing and the SAR government for them going amuck, and seeing that Hong Kong people are helpless in doing anything about it, they did it on purpose. This is ironclad evidence to suggest the degeneration of the police force, and that Hong Kong police have been the most horrible threat to the personal safety of Hong Kong people. Both the pregnant woman manhandled by the police and the little girl fixed on to the ground with bended knees are victims of this kind of police culture. No Hong Kongers, who are vulnerable to such a threat to personal safety, can keep aloof from it.

As such, having been engaged in education, I condemn the police for their proceedings. My declaration is as follows,

“The police officers abused the power of law enforcement, using unnecessarily excessive force to subdue a twelve year old girl! Being part of education, I now publicly condemn the police for violating discipline, acting in defiance of the rule of law and abusing power. I hope people from all walks of life sternly condemn together with me the police, who are savage, unreasonable, and have already posed a severe threat to Hong Kong citizens.”

Parents, education workers and even ordinary citizens should not stay reticent about such kind of police culture, nor should they turn a blind eye to the police being deliberately provocative! We should resolutely react, stop preposterous arguments from prevailing, and not get accustomed to this kind of absurdity. We should say no to this government and police force!

Click here for Chinese version

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play