An anonymous but outspoken netizen recently dubbed the Hong Kong police, or perhaps just the national security specialists, our Gestapo-po. This seems very unfair.
It is commonplace that some languages spring into use in particular circumstances. Discussions of music can hardly avoid Italian. The writers of restaurant menus instinctively reach for their French. These choices honour the unique historic contributions of the Italians to music and the French to fine food.
It is less clear why discussions of authoritarian regimes or secret police forces always veer in the direction of German.
People often complain that people of my generation make too much of World War Two. Well, we grew up with it. All adults had been affected in one way or another. Both of my parents served in the Army; grandparents were dug out of the rubble of their house during the Blitz, aunts and uncles were child evacuees from London. In the 50s, bomb gaps still scarred most European cities.
But there can surely be no excuse for younger generations, who seem to have developed the same habit. Even the august Economist has this verbal tic. Writing about restrictions on business research companies in China it said this: “In areas like Xinjiang and chipmaking, investigations now appear entirely verboten.” Well, OK, we want some elegant variation on “forbidden,” but why not “interdit” or “prohibido”?
Hitler was an awful person and his era in Germany was an awful time, but it only lasted 13 years from 1932 to 1945. Adolf did not invent despotism or genocide, and nor was he the last person to practise them.
It is difficult to assign degrees of nastiness to national leaders but as the 20th century’s worst mass murderer, Hitler trails Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, both of whom lasted much longer and caused harms with which their surviving citizens are still living.
Michael Lewis wrote after a visit to Berlin that the Germans seemed to have accepted the role of “history’s bad guys”. It is surely time to put this behind us.
Comparisons with the Third Reich are also unfair to our police force, which may no longer be its cuddly old self but has not explored torture, assassination or rounding people up for extermination.
Actually the only thing it has in common with the Gestapo is its size. It is difficult to find an unambiguous figure for either force because they both employ or employed civilians and part-timers, and changed over time. But something between 30,000 and 40,000 seems about right.
As the Gestapo had the whole of occupied Europe to deal with and the Hong Kong police only have to worry about tiny Hong Kong, this raises an interesting question: do we need so many cops and if so, why?
Happily the United Nations has collected a lot of data on the size of police forces which can be accessed here. The usual way of standardising for size is to consider the number of police people per 100,000 population.
Unfortunately this doesn’t really cater for the fact that small places need a certain number of people if they are to have a police force at all. So you get freakish numbers for places like Pitcairn Island (no. of police: 2, no. per 100,000 inhabitants 3,509) the Vatican City (130 cops, 15,439) and Niue (16 cops, 1,038).
Taking the microstates into account, the UN determined that the median ratio per 100,000, which can be considered the norm for a decent-sized country, was 300. It also noticed that in West Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe the figure was more like 400. So Hong Kong’s figure (35,804 with a ratio to population of 477 in 2020) could be considered rather high.
This may be partly a colonial legacy. In the days when the BBC screened documentaries about the then Royal force, the number of people involved in routine call-outs was a constant wonder. A British Z car was a family saloon with two men in it. Its Hong Kong counterpart involved an expat inspector to represent the interests of the government, a sergeant to give orders, an interpreter to tell the inspector as much of what was going on as it was seemly for him to know, two constables to do the actual work and a driver… in a long-wheelbase Landrover.
Whatever the cause, Hong Kong’s police to population number seems a bit large compared with the sort of places with which we like to compare ourselves or consider as possible emigration destinations: England and Wales 227, Canada 184, Australia 264, US 242. Denmark, often cited as the world’s happiest country, gets by with 196 and Finland, usually its rival for the title, has 132.
Outstanding in the other direction is our perennial regional rival Singapore, with 44,162 police people giving a police to population ratio of 810. This seems particularly extravagant when compared with the figures for our motherland, which acknowledged 2,000,000 police people – a suspiciously round number – giving a force to population ratio of 143.
This seems to be the sort of figure we might aspire to. But do not hold your breath. Countries run by the army have large armies. Territories run by the police force…
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