Hong Kong police officials acknowledged today that officers’ much-delayed response to the Yuen Long MTR station attack was largely excluded from calculations used to determine average response times for last year, with one public relations official accusing netizens of calling the emergency hotline en mass in order to “paralyze” it before the attack took place.
The comments were made after a paper calculating emergency response times in the New Territories was submitted to the Legislative Council’s Finance Committee on Monday. According to Now TV News, the paper said that for 2019, emergency services received a total of 84,276 calls to emergency services, and that in the New Territories, officers responded within 15 minutes to almost 98 percent of calls received.
But when asked by pro-democracy lawmaker Roy Kwong if that figure included the police response to the Yuen Long MTR incident — which saw officers conspicuously absent from the train station for almost 40 minutes as white-shirted thugs attacked pro-democracy protesters — Chief Superintendent Alice Lee conceded the Yuen Long incident was not included because it was a “very specific incident, an incident that happened in one day.”
The response prompted an outraged retort from pro-democracy lawmaker Kwok Ka-ki, who said “a ‘very specific incident’ means a ‘no need to bother with it incident,'” adding that “the way the police works is, if they don’t like the sound of a number, then they won’t include it.”
Speaking to RTHK’s Millennium program this morning, Chief Superintendent Kenneth Kwok from the Police Public Relations Branch said that about 24,000 emergency phone calls were made citywide in the three hours around the time of the attack, which Kwok said was 80 times more than usual, and that the system was overloaded as a result. The vast majority of the calls weren’t connected, and were therefore not included in the citywide total.
“On that night, people with ulterior motives went online and called on people to dial 999 at the same time,” he continued. “This paralyzed the 999 emergency response center; as a result, it was a lot for the emergency response center to handle, and only 1,100 calls went through.”
He then went on to say that only 30 of the calls that went through concerned Yuen Long and were included in police data.
The Yuen Long attack — which is often referred to as the “721 incident” — saw dozens of people injured after a group of men, some with triad links, turned up at the train station and began to indiscriminately beat commuters, reporters, and protesters returning from an unruly pro-democracy rally on Hong Kong Island on July 21.
Police took more than 40 minutes to respond to calls for help, and video from that evening showed two police officers leaving the train station while dozens of white-shirted men gathered in advance of the attack.
So far, fewer than 40 people have been arrested, of whom seven have been formally charged for their involvement with the attack.
Police’s belated and largely ineffectual response to the attack contributed to a huge loss of faith in the force, the effects of which can still be seen today.
Police have previously hinted that the protesters deserved to be assaulted, alleging that a group of people led protesters to Yuen Long to cause trouble, echoing similar comments by controversial pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho that a pro-democracy lawmaker had orchestrated the attack.
