The Hong Kong Police Force leapt into the world of Twitter yesterday with both feet — and some machine guns, and a helicopter, and some sweet boats — releasing a promotional video of Hong Kong’s finest in all their crime-fighting, pet-rescuing glory.
The video, one of the force’s first-ever tweets after joining the platform yesterday, was accompanied by its slogan: “We serve with pride and care.”
We serve with pride and care. #Professionalism #Fairness #Caring pic.twitter.com/LFgaalxRTz
— Hong Kong Police Force (@hkpoliceforce) January 29, 2019
The magnum opus — or .357 Magnum opus judging by the vast amount of hardware on display — is one minute and six seconds of non-stop action, depicting, among other things, police evacuating senior citizens (and their dogs) from a building, a forensics lab straight out of CSI, SWAT teams storming a building, and what may or may not be a hair-raising cat rescue by helicopter. All this set to a rousing score, with a few Shaw Brothers-esque sound effects thrown in for good measure.
They even found a role for hero cop Ifzal Zaffar, including a scene that appears to be based on the time the officer of Pakistani descent talked a suicidal Urdu-speaking man off of a construction crane last year.
However, reactions to video have not been as universally positive as the police force may have hoped. One Twitter user responding to the force’s post tweaked the slogan to read “we serve the Party with pride and care,” and included a video of ex-police Superintendent Franklin Chu assaulting pro-democracy protesters in 2014.
Another commenter added some very pointed scare quotes around “pride” and “care,” posting a video of officers beating Occupy protester Ken Tsang in 2014, a case that saw several cops convicted of assault.
The video did have the intended effect on some, however, with one commenter praising its “cinematic feel.” Another, meanwhile, simply said, “Add oil,” a Cantonese cheer of encouragement.
But things haven’t been all cat rescues and boat chases for the Hong Kong Police Force. On the same day the video was posted, police revealed that the number of officers arrested for crimes had risen to 45 in 2018, a 55 percent increase from the year before, the South China Morning Post reports.
Addressing the increase, police Commissioner Stephen Lo Wai-chung vowed the force was “sparing no effort in eradicating these bad apples.”
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