My Take | Stand with Hong Kong police

A commission of inquiry looking only into police misconduct? You’ve got to be kidding. If Beijing and the Hong Kong governments are willing to throw local police under the bus to placate rioters, it will be the worst thing they have ever done in this crisis. Don’t let that happen.

In its usual spineless way, the government has been using “unnamed sources”, top officials whose identities you could pretty much guess, to leak information about forming such a commission as a future option. We all know where this is going – they are testing the water. Well, test this.

Throughout the summer, the police have been the only effective force containing the riots and destruction while the rest of the government went into complete paralysis – or worse, clandestinely sabotaging itself.

I don’t want to romanticise our police. They have, without doubt, made many mistakes in the past five months. Some officers could have acted more professionally on the ground, in several well-known incidents. But on the whole, the police have performed admirably when compared to any Western force facing similar circumstances.

But if you buy into the absurd argument that police provoked the rioters, why don’t you let the entire force take a holiday and see how that would work out for the city?

The problem is that large swathes of the local population, not just rioters and opposition pan-democrats, have taken “hate the police” to a pathological level. But you just can’t calm mass hysteria with a public lynching of the very disciplined force that has helped maintain the city in a modicum of order and safety. I am sorry, but sacrificing the police will not do.

From the start, the rioters and their supporters believe their own propaganda that police are inherently violent, but they themselves have been peaceful, and if they have responded violently, they are always provoked by the police. Disband the police, they say. Why not cancel the government?