Community policing in the Yau Ma Tei wholesale fruit market in Hong Kong : a social capital perspective

Abstract

The question of how police discretion is being governed takes on a distinctive inflection in the special circumstances of post-handover Hong Kong. This is because the population places tremendous stake on the rule of law, regarding it as the quality that distinguishes government in the Special Administrative Region from that in the rest of China. However, law is inadequate to maintain every aspect of order, and police discretion is necessary. The governance of police discretion is therefore a significant issue in this study.

Institutionally, the organization of Hong Kong’s government is structured by historical tensions between British attempts to create a legacy of democratic empowerment, and subsequent reforms removing practical power from representative councils. That means that, in contemporary Hong Kong, the police manage local order in a space lacking the kind of local democratic processes conventionally associated with community policing. However, community policing has been a guiding ideal in Hong Kong’s police reform in the contemporary period. This thesis inquires into what “community policing” actually means under the unique political circumstances of contemporary Hong Kong, focusing on the governance of discretion.

The empirical focus of this study is the police’s management of conflicts over the use of space around a wholesale market in downtown Kowloon. Given that Hong Kong is very crowded, and handling disputes over the use of space is an important part of governmental practice, this thesis asks: how is it that a traditional market persists in enjoying a monopolistic use of public space? To answer this question, the study maps the complex dynamics of interactions among the police (the frontline and managerial officers), market stakeholders and their merchant association, District Council, government offices other than the police, and members of the general public.

The picture that emerges from this case study is this. Like everywhere, Hong Kong’s police are responsible for managing nuisances around the marketplace under a police ordinance. However, it is found that the discretionary element of managing nuisances is very often associated with social capital embedded in the social networks between the police and market stakeholders, thus placing the frontline police officers in the position of advocating for a customary order of the local community. More surprisingly, such a governance of police discretion is against the District Council, which is the quasi-democratic representative body of this local community and consistently calls for “full enforcement of the law” in dealing with the unlawful use of public space by the market. Lastly, the governance of police discretion is found to be legitimatized by the effort on the part of market merchant association to transform their marketplace from its earlier association with mercenary activity into a symbol of Hong Kong’s collective cultural heritage.

By showing how the police work to maintain this order, the case study gives insight into the way by which the globally dominant idea of “community policing” has taken on its new meanings when it has been adapted to serve the particular circumstances of post-colonial and non-democratic Hong Kong.