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HONG KONG: The Hong Kong Police Chief said on Tuesday (May 12) that his officers should have been more professional in dealing with the media during protests in which they sprayed journalists and knelt some in one area. cordoned off.
Police arrested about 230 people after Sunday’s protests in which hundreds gathered in shopping malls to chant and chant pro-democracy slogans, challenging the ban on groups of more than eight, with the aim of curbing the coronavirus. .
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A protester is held on the ground before being arrested by undercover police during a protest in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district on May 10, 2020. (Photo: AFP / ISAAC LAWRENCE)
“Regarding the media experience on that day, I also think it is undesirable,” Chris Tang said at a district council meeting.
“I think we need to review, and even investigate, what happened at that time. I also think we should have been more professional.”
Police in the Asian financial center fired pepper spray and conducted arrest and search operations on the public and the media, and the Hong Kong Association of Journalists said some media filming was blocked.
READ: Hong Kong Leader Vows Education Review After Protests
Video footage posted online showed that police were pushing journalists, as well as dozens of people, some in yellow vests with press marks, forced to kneel on a sidewalk behind a police cordon.
Special response police arrive during a protest in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district on May 10, 2020. (Photo: AFP / ISAAC LAWRENCE
Masked protesters during a protest in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district on May 10, 2020. (Photo: AFP / ISAAC LAWRENCE)
The former British colony, which does not require authorities to examine a press pass, has a long tradition of vibrant media, with volunteer reporters for dozens of online student publications covering protests since they erupted last year.
On Monday, police said they took two reporter journalists, ages 13 and 16, who had attended the previous day’s protest, to a station “for their safety” but without arresting them, and their parents then took them home. .
In a letter to Hong Kong press associations, the police said that while the force respected freedom of expression and of the media, the officers had confiscated false press passes in the past and faced obstruction of some people in yellow vests.
After about three weeks without virus transmission in Hong Kong, protests are expected to escalate in the summer months, to press for democracy in the city that returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
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