Mong Kok riot highlights Hong Kong police’s intelligence and response failings, former senior officer says

As the dust settles in riot-hit Mong Kok and dozens of suspects are rounded up following the violence earlier this week, questions are being asked about how the police responded and why they didn’t see trouble coming.

One former senior officer claimed that an understandable switch of focus which has seen manpower and resources ploughed into fighting crime and gathering intelligence in cyberspace may have taken the edge off traditional detective work, including the use of undercover agents in the field and the cultivation of informants.

Following the unprecedented events of Occupy when the densely packed, working class district of Kowloon – a curious patchwork of shopping malls, food stalls, traditional markets and triad-run brothels – emerged as a key centre of protest, “localist” groups have staged frequent nightly stunts and protests there.

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These splintered and marginal groups, which are seeking some form of independence for Hong Kong and campaign against what they see as the growing influence of Beijing in the city’s affairs, should be well-known to the police.

The senior ex-officer said: “If not before Occupy and certainly after it, it should have been a priority to make the right moves to make sure that good, solid, on-the-ground intelligence was flowing about what they were up to.

“That and the fact that Mong Kok has a well-established criminal underbelly should have meant that the force had the place sewn up, with eyes and ears everywhere. But that seems not to have been the case,” said the officer who spent more than 20 years in the force.

While the police have long been monitoring the movements and plans of radical groups in the cyber world since the Occupy movement and acknowledged that “something” would happen on the first day of the Lunar New Year, it seems they did not have the full picture.