Public sensibilities towards crime and disorder in Hong Kong

Abstract

How do people think, feel and behave about their safety in response to crime and disorder in society? This paper is based on focus group findings of a three-year research project on the fear of crime and trust in crime control in Hong Kong funded by the HK Research Grants Council (HKU740211H). Following the rich tradition of a sociology of public sensibilities towards signal crimes in UK and USA, this paper argue for the need to foreground the situated nature of people’s perceptions and reception of danger and disorder in the mundane contexts of their daily life. More specifically, it argues that men, women and young people in postcolonial Hong Kong draw on a range of cultural resources, attachments and identifications in their ‘crime talk’ – from personal biography and particular anecdotes about localities to larger observations about ‘outsiders’ and speculations about the future. In this way, people’s everyday crime talk informs not only their sense of place but also their sense of its place in a larger societal set of concerns and tensions. Overall, the paper aims to theorize the meanings and abstractions behind people’s feelings about crime and their connections with other dimensions of social life in the case study of Hong Kong and to draw out the implications for researching into crime and disorder in Asian societies.