Jun Pang – Hong Kong protests: Imagining the end of the police – 13 August 2019
This zine collects a short text by Jun Pang originally published on Popula, and later on with the Lausan collective. In the wake of particularly brutal actions on 11 August, it probes the question of police abolition in a city which has historically for the most part loved the police, in addition to proposing solidarity with sex workers and migrant workers, highlighting the border and security as emblematic of broader racialised, gendered oppressions. Lausan also recently published a reading guide on the abolition of police in the context of Hong Kong.
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“This critique of ‘criminality’ may well create the foundations for moving from an anti-HKPF to anti-police stance altogether––in short, an abolitionist politics. As Angela Davis writes in Abolition Democracy, egalitarian democracy will only emerge when all structures of domination are abolished. Apart from eliminating the existence of police and prisons, we must, in Davis’s words, ‘contest the absolute authority of law’: we must commit ourselves to the process of imagining solutions to structural problems—ways of relating to one another—for ourselves, and beyond pre-constituted frameworks designed to maintain the status quo.
The next step—one which has already been taken by some thinkers and commentators—is to strengthen the connection between the escalating police violence against protesters, and the daily violence suffered by those excluded from the ideal model of middle-class Hong Kong Chinese citizenship. As Hong Kong protesters fight against the kind of violence enacted by ‘dirty cops’ against protesters, they must also commit to fighting the arbitrary designation of particular communities as ‘criminal’. In 2013 alone, HKPF conducted 1.6 million spot-checks—four times the number of spot-checks conducted by police in London and New York—disproportionately targeting minority groups.
After a protest in Tuen Mun in which protesters accused and harassed a group of women referred to as ‘prostitutes from the Mainland’, sex workers who bear the brunt of ‘anti-vice’ crackdowns asked why they are not seen instead as allies in the fight against police brutality. Hong Kong has the highest proportion of female prisoners (of the total prisoner population) in the world. Academics have pointed out that for migrant sex workers in particular, there exists a ‘”conveyor belt”… that takes women from the police station, through the courts, and invariably to prison.’”