AKK 382/16
114)
DICTATED OVER THE TELEPHONE BY SIR MURRAY MACLEHOSE, 5.30 PM, FRIDAY, 2 DECEMBER
Commissioner's Ideas
1.
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No RS ir d
The basic requirement is to supplement the various outward public relations exercises (Public Relations Bureau, Police Community Relations Officer, etc) with equal effort pointing inward at the police themselves. Organizationally, he wishes to set up a field force of staff relations officers who would report direct to a Staff Relations Assistant Commissioner at headquarters. The members of the fild officers would be located in major police stations. wishes to recruit as an assistant to the Staff Relations Assistant Commissioner a work psychologist.
A
He
2. He sees improvement, or at any rate a thorough review of welfare arrangements, as an essential element in the work to be done.
3.
He also sees the need for some means of speaking to the officers as a whole direct without his words or instructions being passed to the men through the mouths of local officers. For this purpose he proposes to install a special closed circuit TV system throughout the police stations.
Police Support Group
A•
The Acting Governor will set up a Police Support Group under his own Chairmanship consisting of theSecretary for Security, the Secretary for Home Affairs, the Commissioner or his representative and the Director of Information Services. It would not include an ICAC representative. Its object would be to monitor developments on the staff side in the Police during the critical period that lies ahead, and do everything it can to assist in the improvement of staff relations along the lines proposed above by the Commissioner, but it would also try to improve public relations with the Police. During the last four years big efforts have been made with considerable success by the Police to transform their relations with the public. It is now proposed to organize, allbeit in a tolerably low key, a
into the reciprocal move by the public so as to fit the Police social life of the Police Force in which they work. This is already being done in the New Territories as a matter of course, but in the larger communities in the city just has not happened.
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