Understanding protest policing as moral disengagement in Hong Kong

Abstract

The introduction of the Hong Kong extradition bill in 2019 triggered a series of protests and an ongoing political crisis. The public order policing actions adopted by the Hong Kong Police Force have been highly contested in the politically divided Hong Kong. This study aims to shed light on how the police organization made sense of and justified its decisions and actions publicly through examining the statements that the Hong Kong Police Force made between June 2019 to December 2019. Content analysis was conducted to review a range of secondary data including police press conferences, press releases and clarifications, social media posts as well as relevant statements and letters. The study used the concept of moral disengagement in the analysis. The research results suggest that while mechanisms or moral disengagement such as attribution of blame, moral justification and euphemistic language were commonly adopted by the police in justifying their actions in public order policing, there were distinctive differences in the use of mechanisms across various media.