EXTRACT FROM "MIDWEEK" 16.1.75:
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PRENDERGAST:
Corruption here is well organised and therefore all the more difficult shall we say to get into and all the more difficult to tackle because when you get an organisation you get a structure and in a structure if somebody is perhaps removed, maybe somebody else
moves into position and knows how to operate it, therefore you have to know how to operate.
MANGOLD:
How long is it going to be before you can predict with
some safety that you are winning?
PRENDERGAST:
Well this is a very, very difficult question to quantify or really consider. I think that we will have to be going for at least two years, in fact I would say that about two years from now we ought to have made a very definite impression on corruption in Hong Kong. I think to know whether you are winning or not is a question of feel, it is a question of understanding, it is a question of sensing the atmosphere that you've created.
MANGOLD:
And do you think you are going to win?
PRENDERGAST: I am sure I am going to win. I wouldn't be sitting at this desk if I wasn't sure I was going to win. I've got no doubt whatseover, I mean the whole idea of taking this task is to do it and I intend to do it.
MANGOLD:
To convince the increasingly cynical hearts and minds in Hong Kong, the ICAC . has the unenviable job of keeping itself clean. The graft bisters will have to remain above graft. But on the very day we spoke to Jack Cater, the first of the ICAC untouchables found himself in trouble. A young ICAC detective
was arrested and subsequently convicted of borrowing money from a police station sergeant who later became and remained a suspect in a corruption investigation.
I suppose there might be some
....
CATER: could be some feeling that the clean commission as it were was not quite so clean but of course I must refute this and I would say that perhaps it undermines what I have just said to you, the fact that we are taking action against our own officers when the need arises.
MANGOLD:
The ICAC is committed to smashing corruption in the police force yet the Hong Kong government still finds itself with a delicate problem. Hong Kong's policemen are one of the best riot trained forces in the world and the maintenance of internal security has always been a political priority. (BACKGROUND TRAINING) Yet if ICAC is successful, it could break the morale of the police. (BACKGROUND) Nobody's forgotten that these men stood in 1967 between the maintenance of law and order and social breakdown following the Communist-inspired riots. To-day, social pressures alone could still blow the lid of Hong Kong's volatile community and then the police would once again be called on to pick up the pieces quickly and efficiently and without relying on the help of the British military carrison whose intervention would only provoke Red China's retaliation. (BACKGROUND)
BBH