British expert claims Hong Kong police turned protesters into radicals and drove them to increasing levels of violence

Name: Hong Kong protests – China's Rebel City: Part 1 – Marching into the Unknown
Uploaded: 2020-11-19T06:41:24.000Z
Duration: 13 min 20 s
Description: Hong Kong protests – China's Rebel City: Part 1 – Marching into the Unknown

Professor Clifford Stott suggests use of tear gas by police outside Legislative Council in June 2019 began escalation of violence

Stott was briefly involved in Independent Police Complaints Council investigation but quit over concerns about watchdog’s limited power

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An anti-government protester uses a tennis racquet to return a tear gas canister fired by police in Tsuen Wan on August 25, 2019. Photo: Sam Tsang

Ng Kang-chung

Published: 2:41pm, 19 Nov 2020Updated: 9:09am, 20 Nov 2020

The actions of Hong Kong police officers during last year’s civil unrest could have been directly responsible for an increase in violence and the radicalisation of protesters, a British expert on policing has claimed.

Professor Clifford Stott, of Keele University, believes the use of tear gas outside the Legislative Council complex on June 12 last year was a “pivotal moment of psychological change” among protesters, who came to see police as “illegitimate” and “partisan”.

The subsequent “successful occupation of [the Legislative Council building on July 1 was] itself experienced as an important moment of further empowerment for radical protest tactics and identity,” Stott wrote in a 22-page report, which was published on Tuesday in Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice.

Stott, a world-renowned expert in protest policing, was approached by Hong Kong’s Independent Police Complaints Council (IPCC) to help investigate the policing of last year’s protests, but later quit over concerns about the watchdog’s limited power and its ability to conduct a proper inquiry.

The IPCC published its report in May this year, and largely cleared the force of any misconduct.

13:20

Hong Kong protests – China's Rebel City: Part 1 – Marching into the Unknown

Stott said the study of the events in Hong Kong was part of wider research into how riots “start, escalate and spread from one location to another”, and the pattern of the social unrest in 2019 was similar to how riots escalated elsewhere in the world.

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