Police are making deceptive statements about the incident that lead to them ordering the march terminated. They charged into a march of hundreds of thousands to catch 1 person & then acted aggressively & arrogantly as if intending to provoke the crowd.
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Where police charged the march, rather than retreating immediately after detaining the suspect, they set up a cordon. This officer makes a mock lunge at me & then casually checks the press card of a journalist standing nearby. His behavior was typical.
Here police charge wildly into the crowd. See how far they’ve widened the cordon at this point: HSBC is far in the background. They suggest they arrested 5 for vandalising the bank, but only 1 was arrested there. The 4 others were arrested during such mad lunges into the crowd.
Here plainclothes police detain the one person they caught outside the bank & drag him inside. This is at the start of the action. Right after this, an officer swatted my phone & charger out of my hand & threatened to arrest me when I bent down to pick them up.
This is the 2nd person they grabbed & dragged into the bank. This person was nowhere near the bank but was snatched out of the crowd after the 1st person was detained. The plainclothes cops were panicking at this point, as the riot cops & raptors hadn’t yet arrived.
As you can see, these officers look more like thugs than police & quite a few of them act like that.
When the police finally retreated after about 20min, they shot teargas. But they’d already gone down Luard Rd; there was no reason to shoot into the crowd from several 100m away. They claim people threw things at them but here they’re not targeting such people but the whole march
So there’s no question that police 1st charged the march, then remained, provoking & charging the crowd & arresting people, then after they departed, fired teargas at the march, then ordered CHRF, the march organizer, to call it off. In that order. It was all the police’s doing.
On past mass marches, there was also vandalism. The police didn't charge the march; as long as the march didn’t deviate from the agreed route, they left it alone. So this practice of terminating a peaceful march due to isolated acts of vandalism is new.
In the past month, there is a pattern of police attacking peaceful rallies they themselves approved: 1) teargasing the Dec 1 march; 2) attacking & terminating the Dec 23 Uighur solidarity rally, & 3) now attacking & terminating the huge Jan 1 march of over 1.03 million.
Police teargassed peaceful gatherings prior to Dec 1, such as the Nov 2 rally in Victoria Park & the Sep 29 start of the Global Anti-Totalitarianism Day march, but they did so on grounds they were 'unauthorized' & therefore 'unlawful'. Attacking peaceful, approved rallies is new.
But in another sense, this has been a tendency of police all along: The very 1st grievances against police arose after police attacked a largely peaceful protest at govt HQ on June 12. 100,000 were gathered; about 100 threw stuff at police; police attacked & dispersed everyone.
So this police habit of attacking peaceful protesters has been present all along. The police are not learning from past mistakes but deliberately & arrogantly repeating them, & then lying about what they did. We are #HK people, we are the majority, & police treat us as the enemy
That police&govt speak of 'enforcing the law' under these circumstances is ludicrous. If they really want to 'enforce the law', give us genuine universal suffrage- that's in the Basic Law that they break every day. When did you ever see #HK police attempting to enforce that law?
