History of the Hong Kong Police Force
[1] Policemen from different ethnic groups were assigned a different alphabetical letter before their batch numbers: "A" for Europeans, "B" for Indians, "C" for Cantonese, and "D" for recruited from Shandong Province.
The 1890s brought challenges, both operational and organisational - there were outbreaks of bubonic plague in 1893–94; whilst the annexation of the New Territories (an additional 356sq.miles of land) in 1898–99, created difficult, but surmountable problems.
The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 brought civil unrest, and the start of World War I in 1914 saw many European officers enlist and return to the United Kingdom.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Hong Kong's general peace was punctuated by bouts of civil unrest sparked by labour disputes, instability in China and Japanese militarism.
When war came again in 1941, an unknown number of police officers and reserves - Chinese, Indian, European and Eurasian - had their lives taken by the Japanese during both the main conflict and the occupation.
From 1942 to 1945, Japan occupied Hong Kong and the HKPF was temporarily disbanded and replaced by Japanese Kempeitai,[2] which was headquartered at the Legislative Council Building.
After the war, the mechanism of government in Hong Kong was in shambles; no men or equipment, devastated buildings and important resources like intelligence files, fingerprints, criminal records and personnel documents all lost or destroyed.
Governor Sir Mark Young broadly supported them, and they were implemented under Commissioner Duncan Macintosh thereby generating the foundation of today's structure and philosophy.
In 1956, supporters of the China Nationalist movement defied government regulations providing the pretext for the eruption of conflict with pro-Communist activists and sympathisers - serious disorder was suppressed by the force with assistance from the British military.
During this time, the police, along with members of departments like Public Works, Fire, Transport and others, all had their own distinct methods of earning illicit income to boost their meagre wages.
It took the determined stance of Governor MacLehose, together with Commissioner Charles Payne Sutcliffe, to instigate the firmest of measures to eradicate syndicated corruption—and the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 was the prime one.
After teething troubles, including a mass walkout by officers in 1977, by the early '80s a combination of the ICAC, firm police management, better emoluments and an amnesty had succeeded in destroying the overall culture, removing powerful figures, educating against greed and increasing instances of accountability.
[4] In April 2012, the Hong Kong Police Force publicly confirmed a ten-year contractual agreement with the 3M Cogent company to develop the biometric arm of the organization.
Live scan technology and biometric identification products feature in the arrangement, and will be utilized in 32 city police force branches and three immigration locations.
[17] In November 2020, the Hong Kong Police Force launched a hotline where residents can report breaches of the national security law that China imposed earlier in the year.
[citation needed] While cap badges and other insignia changed with the ending of British rule, the basic khaki drill and navy blue uniforms of the colonial period remained in use.
