Reporters called out a police official at an afternoon police briefing after he denied his officers kicked a protest volunteer at Yuen Long on Saturday, claiming they had only kicked a “yellow object.”
Past instances of alleged brutality were hurled at the official for playing down footage showing dozens of officers surrounding a man in a yellow vest lying in an alley. In the video, a woman can be heard yelling: “Sir don’t hit him! Officer stop!” Other people in the background can be heard chanting “release him,” while other officers appear to shine their flashlights into people’s cameras, a tactic some police have been accused of using to prevent filming.
Vasco Williams, Acting Senior SP(Ops)(NTN Regional HQ) argues police didn’t assault or kick “this yellow object”. This is the said video obtained from Yuen Long Residents. A Human is not an object. #antiELAB #ExtraditionLaw #HongKongProtests pic.twitter.com/SKOWTPLllX
— Galileo Cheng (@galileocheng) September 23, 2019
According to Apple Daily, the man was part of a volunteer group called “Protect the Children,” a group of mostly elderly Hongkongers who appear at protest sites in yellow vests to usher protesters to safe places or give them time to escape from police.
The person who filmed the video, who gave her name as “Winnie,” told the newspaper she was standing on the podium of a building overlooking Fung Yau Street North in Yuen Long when she saw officers kick the man even though he appeared to have been subdued.
A subsequent photo posted on the website shows the man sitting against a wall, apparently unconscious.
Winnie told the newspaper that as she was filming, officers kept calling her a “cockroach,” a term used by police of pro-Beijing supporters to describe protesters, and that they stopped when they realized she was filming.
Acting Senior Superintendent (Operations) Vasco Williams of New Territories North Region denied any accusations of police misconduct when asked at a police press briefing this afternoon.
Live-streamed footage of this afternoon’s police briefing. A reporter inquires about the incident at the 38-minute mark.
“You mentioned a video in which shows what appears to be an officer kicking a yellow object on the ground,” Williams told the reporter.
“Now we don’t know what that object is, but there are other videos that are more clear, that showed the entire incident and there’s no malpractice by the police whatsoever in the clear video.”
When challenged by an Apple Daily reporter that the yellow “object” was a man, Williams said that the “genuine online feed” showed there was no assault, suggested that one of the videos must be “doctored,” and asked the person who filmed the incident to come forward and speak to the police to verify the authenticity of the video showing the assault.
In a subsequent answer, he then sought to clarify what he meant by the term “object,” saying: “When I said it was an object, my next phrase was gonna be the video was very out of focus, and it could have been an object, a person, a bag, or a vest before I was interrupted.”
When pressed by an SCMP reporter why so many officers were needed, Williams said the man in the yellow vest was brought in for assaulting an officer at a cordon line, and that the large number of officers was “corresponding to the number of protesters, the rioters, that were on the street that day,” saying that 100 people were on the street.
He later went on to say that the suspect had pushed an officer several times and bit an officer on the right hand when he was taken to the alley.
There was no immediate way to corroborate his version of events.
“Knowing you’re being videoed, do you think any police officer would be that stupid to assault someone under detention? I don’t think so, but of course we’ll investigate this.”
Things got heated when reporters in the room began yelling about past incidents of perceived brutality, such as a group of cops filmed beating a pro-democracy protester in a dark corner and a pair of officers caught on tape assaulting an elderly detainee tied to a hospital bed.
A member of staff mediating the press briefing interjected to move on to the next question before Williams could answer.
A member of Protect The Children, Roy Chan, confirmed that the person in the video was one of their members. “We are infuriated by this incident of police brutality,” Roy told Apple Daily. “Our member did not resist arrest nor in any way attack the police.”
Chan went on to add that they have contacted a lawyer and learned that the suspect’s gums and teeth were bleeding and that he was experiencing dizziness. He was later taken for treatment to Pok Oi Hospital, where he remains in police custody.
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