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A very successful example of this sort
of thing has been a campaign to clean Hong Kong and keep it clean. The campaign involved the marrying together of regular and emergency cleansing services with organised popular action and some stiff penal back-up. More than 40,000 voluntary workers were involved. A vast and imaginative information campaign was mounted. The result has been to turn a notoriously dirty city into quite a clean one in about six weeks. The problem will be to keep it that way, but meanwhile - and this is my point - everyone is proud of what has been done and pleased with themselves for having played their part, and rather surprised to find that by this combination of government and popular action a long- accepted blight can be removed. Not unnaturally they are now looking round for new fields to conquer, which is exactly what one would want. It will be our business to ensure these stirrings of civic consciousness are neither disappointed nor perverted. I constantly bear in mind the injunction of my predecessor that in Hong Kong if one moves a stone, one can never know what will stir from beneath it.
2 15.
The year has had an ugly feature. Crime and in particular violent crime, continued to increase fast, although it has apparently been held during the last 2 months. But the facts are that in the last 4 years violent crime has increased by about 140% including homicide by 130%, the percentage increases of 1972 over 1971 being 27% and 17% respectively. This has upset and alarmed people to a point at which a return to safer conditions has become the most sincere and vociferous desire of the population. We are acting to meet it by a whole combination of measures. But I am perplexed to discover that in this (to me) unfamiliar science there are to guide one virtually neither accepted rules nor proved successes. It is far worse than economics. Fascinating as the whole subject is, it is too vast to follow up in an annual report, and I merely bring it to your attention as a factor affecting the peace of mind of the population and the standing of the Government. In 1973 we will try to overcome but in addition to the efficiency of the police, which in any case is high, a real reversal of historic and social attitudes will be necessary.
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