Just Saying | ‘How to kill Hong Kong police’ and what comes next
- Yonden Lhatoo warns that relentless war being waged by protesters against the city’s police force has crossed a dangerous new line after an officer was knifed by masked men while returning home from work
I find it deeply troubling that someone just tried to murder a police officer in Hong Kong and hardly anyone seems to be bothered much, as we all move on to the next cycle of news about mass protests and anti-government campaigns.
Over more than 12 weeks of relentless guerilla warfare waged against police by rioters, radicals, hooligans, juvenile delinquents and common criminals sheltering under the broader umbrella of a supposedly peaceful people’s uprising, frontline officers have been felled by bricks, burned by petrol bombs and acid, beaten unconscious with sticks and metal rods, stabbed with spears, and hit by ball bearings fired from catapults.
But the attempted murder of this policeman takes it to a whole new level. If the perpetrators are indeed part of the protest movement, it’s terrifying that they no longer feel the need to be confined by its narrative. No heat-of-the-moment violence here – just calculated, cold-blooded crime.
And if the culprits turn out to be triad gangsters disguised as protesters to settle old scores, the wider implications for law and order are just as terrifying.
None of this should come as a surprise, really. Just look at all the hate forums online, particularly LIHKG, Hong Kong’s version of Reddit, with page after page of discussion threads and tutorials on how to maim and kill police officers, when and where to lie in wait for them, what weapons to use. It’s all there, in plain sight, and absolutely nothing is being done to muzzle it because any attempt to shut it down feeds right into the mass hysteria about repression and diminishing freedoms here. Our government is too timid to bite the bullet.
