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15.
Law and Order is always a matter of concern to people. We are a law abiding community, a model for others in the region and elsewhere. Over the past three years, the level of violent crime has declined by 11 per cent and the number of armed robberies has fallen by 61 per cent. That is the good news. But the overall level of crime has risen by just under 6 per cent. That is a cause for concern and we will have to watch it very closely in the months ahead.
To keep up the fight against crime,
* we have put an additional 400 police officers on the beat this year and we
plan to put 200 more on the beat in the year ahead; and
a $350 million Beat Drugs Fund will be launched to help turn the tide of drug abuse, where we've started to make some progress.
These are some of the new things we're doing on top of our existing programmes which are building a more efficient, better educated and trained, cleaner, brighter and more caring community. Anson Chan gave a progress report on how all this work is going earlier this week. We have already met, or are on target to meet, 94% of all our pledges to you for better services since 1992. Where we've fallen behind on targets, we have acknowledged that and are determined to catch up. There aren't many governments in the world which make such a thorough and frank report every year on how they are doing: what they're doing well, what they're doing less well.
Telling you what's happening helps us to work together with you in the interests of Hong Kong.
We need to work with China as well. The meeting between the Foreign Secretary and Vice-Premier Qian Qichen in London last week produced solid and welcome progress in some of the key areas that I referred to when I gave my LegCo Address last year. A smooth through train for the civil service. Co-operation with the Preparatory Committee, including the setting up of a Liaison Office to manage the process on the Hong Kong Government side. The planning of a decent and dignified handover ceremony in 1997. And the talks also committed both sides to further progress on the development of our container port.