Asia's flawed 'finest' helped transform HK
Updated: 2014-03-06 07:33
By Richard Harris(HK Edition)
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He was probably not that much older than us - but the authority and power vested in his uniform spoke for much more. Sharply dressed in the dark blue winter uniform of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, he was still in his 20s and the red flash under his police numbers on his epaulets showed he had passed the highest police standards for speaking English. The shoulders of many of our constables used to bear this with pride.
We had met him on the stone conduit along from Queen Mary Hospital. Few knew all the little paths and trails, the old air raid shelters, and bombed gun posts around Pok Fu Lam in the early 1970s as well as we did. That was real battlefield; and the bush and the snakes made for an adventurous playground. This 150-year old conduit took water from Pok Fu Lam Reservoir to Central so those granite-hewn stones had already lain there for a century as we ran along them - and as 30 years before us, Japanese and British soldiers had fought there.
We had been to the little stall near Queen Mary that sold soft drinks like Mountain Dew and Green Spot, luk bou; and wah mui, or sour plums, to suck on and spit the pips at our friends. At the tender age of 15, I had never spoken to a police constable. Maybe it was because the reaction the world over is to look at your shoelaces whenever a policeman is around. Don't look at him and he won't pick on you; even naive teenagers from nice expatriate families who couldn't conceive of doing anything illegal. The police were to be respected. That's what our parents would have wanted. Yet here was a genuine Chinese policemen, still in his 20s, willing to talk to us; a real human being, with a job and a life.
We talked for maybe half an hour about many things, including corruption. Not long before, in June 1973, the commander of the police in Kowloon, Senior Superintendent Peter Godber, showed up at a side gate at Kai Tak airport. His security pass let him through and he fled on the next flight to London. He was loaded with cash - nearly HK$4.4 million. Six times his total earnings from his police career.
Godber was not the first; just the first to get caught with both hands and feet inside the cookie jar. Some members of that generation were sucked in straight off the boat, into an unrequested pact that swapped institutionalized payoffs for silence. It was a rite of passage. They had come to work in the colonies to keep law and order and make a little money. When they arrived they often found that the little money from their salaries and gratuity and the police flat and trips home every two and a half years could be augmented with somewhat bigger money from protecting illegal gambling syndicates, drug dens and prostitution rings. As Hong Kong had succeeded, the stakes had become much bigger and so the time for the dealings in smoke-filled vice rooms has past.
There were only a few bad eggs and even they were not totally corruptible. Godber himself had been a hero of the 1967 riots showing both leadership skills and bravery. If Hong Kong was threatened or if someone was selling drugs to school children they would impose law and order more strictly than Javert in Les Miserables. However, the maintenance of low-level crime enabled police to keep a close eye on the bad guys for any real trouble and at the same time was good for business through the ranks.
Nothing could be further from the image of our young constable, as efficient a copper as you would expect today; he was a graduate, perhaps more highly educated. Godber's flight shocked Hong Kong as it opened up the specter of corruption in Asia's Finest (and they are) to the glare of public anger. The Governor Sir Murray Maclehose was his own man and overnight made corruption public enemy number one.
Within only three months, he had established the Independent Commission against Corruption, an investigation force that had draconian powers of arrest and enacted legislation that later caught many who were in control of assets incommensurate with their earnings. No longer could you say that you won it on the horses. If you couldn't explain large sums in your bank account, it was evidence against you. Godber was returned to Hong Kong for trial and spent four years in jail. The government responded by increasing police pay so that by then our young police constable was happily earning $300 a month.
It meant that growing up in Hong Kong we felt safe and confident if we worked hard enough, the best would succeed on merit, not because of a rich father. It is that level playing field that attracts today's global and increasingly lawyer-bound world to want to invest here.
We often ran down that path but never again did we meet our policeman. He was a role model to me of selfless service - at an impressionable age. Hong Kong's future prosperity depends on our business being clean, our law just and one where these standards do not slip. We must never forget that it was men like our constable and leaders like Sir Murray - independent men and women who served the community with pride - that built Hong Kong. We are merely trustees of the legacy of their wisdom and good character.
The author pioneered the modern investment management industry in Asia and is founder of Port Shelter Investment Management in Hong Kong.
(HK Edition 03/06/2014 page1)