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REVIEW
examination of the force structure to see how it could be strengthened and improved. From this came a realisation that administration and welfare, among other things, had been neglected during the years of expansion. More recreation facilities, better housing and a need to increase the integration of policemen with the public, were other points stressed. Overall, Hong Kong's policemen take on a major responsibility in acting as the grass- roots contact between authority and the public, and it is the way that individual policemen exercise that authority that does much to influence public attitudes, not just to law and order, bụt to administration generally. The stress being placed, therefore, on developing a more educated, better-paid and more highly motivated force, equipped with modern communica- tions to bring a swift response to public need, is now well understood. This is the direction in which the force is moving, and at the end of the decade, relations between the police and the public had significantly improved, and a greater degree of co-operation with the ICAC had replaced the earlier feelings 'of enmity and suspicion. Notable also was the welcome ability of the force to investigate public complaints against its own officers.
Swift action by the police against criminal gangs has paid dividends and a reduction of some of the most heinous offences was noted. However, at the end of the decade there was still a worrying level of robberies with violence, big cash crimes, gang rape, kidnapping and, following the soaring of the gold price in the final years of the 1970s, a concentration by criminals on the traditionally open and unprotected gold and jewellery shops. Together with banks, these suffered repeated robberies.
If Hong Kong's crime-fighters scored impressively in any one particular direction, however, it was against drug-runners and the drug syndicates. In 1974, the police and the Customs and Excise Service notched up an impressive victory against drug smugglers and by year-end had hammered the major gangs into submission, not only in Hong Kong but those operating between Thailand and Hong Kong as well. This concentrated campaign resulted in the arrest of a number of the 'Mr Bigs' who had controlled the trade and reaped fortunes from it - though some, while out on bail, subsequently took flight to Taiwan. The result of these successes was a growing shortage of drugs on the market, forcing up prices to prohibitive levels and causing a serious crisis among drug-dependent people. The govern- ment had co-ordinated the attack on smugglers with a major drug substitution programme based on methadone, and in the years ahead impressive gains were made. Under a Commis- sioner for Narcotics appointed in 1972 (the first since China's appointment of Com- missioner Lin Tse-hsu in 1839) and with an expenditure of $200 million a year, the tide in the war against narcotics began to turn. Work by the Prisons Department, the Society for the Aid and Rehabilitation of Drug Abusers, the Action Committee Against Narcotics and others, resulted in a sharp fall in the numbers dependent on drugs - perhaps by as much as 60 per cent while the prisons population (once largely drug addicted or drug motivated) had fallen by 52 per cent; those charged with drug offences were down by 42 per cent.
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If the war against drugs is far from over, the achievements in the past decade give hope that it may be brought under control in the years to come, and the incidence of addiction. reduced to insignificant proportions, though the methadone maintenance clinics will be with us for many years, until a new generation can be educated to avoid the insidious attraction.
The successes Hong Kong has chalked-up against narcotics, once considered an in- soluble problem, is perhaps yet another indication of the widespread recognition of, and demand for, a higher quality of life. Having stoically endured the hard, grinding years of the early 1950s and 1960s, a more prosperous community today sets its sights on new and
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