Project Polar Star in Hong Kong: An Innovative Police Strategy to Deal with Deviant Juveniles

Abstract

Project Polar Star was an innovative programme specifically designed to prevent juvenile crime in the Yuen Long Police District in Hong Kong from February 1998 to August 2002. The project team members employed informal, friendly and outreaching methods to approach delinquent juveniles and invited them to participate in the project. The primary goal of the project was to save their targets from criminal settings and bring them back to other social control agencies in the community. Although the project was an effective community policing programme to prevent juvenile crime, this paper finds that project officers encountered several problems as the project moved on. These problems included target selection, the role conflict between a law enforcer and a social worker, working together with other agencies and the assessment of the project.