Colony’s Expatriate Police See ’97 as Incentive to Hand In Badges

Detective Inspector Peter Lisle, undercover but not inconspicuous in his yellow sweatshirt, spots a suspected heroin trafficker and slouches back into the shadows. “Jau la,” he tells his team of cops in Cantonese: “Let’s go.”

The squad of six melts into the bobbing black heads of the mall-front crowd. Lisle stays put until they suddenly hustle the startled suspect around the corner for a quick frisk.

“I’ll blow their cover,” he says. “As a six-foot gweilo [foreigner], I’m instantly recognizable.”

Lisle, 30, a blue-eyed former bobby from England, represents a shrinking remnant of Britain’s colonial legacy. As one of the last 12 expatriate officers to join the Royal Hong Kong Police before the territory returns to China on July 1, his conundrum reveals the changing face of Hong Kong and its most British institution.

Lisle is staying on after the hand-over to Hong Kong’s new sovereign. But a number of other officers are leaving, for reasons ranging from fear of the future under Chinese rulers to the financial windfall offered to British civil servants for early retirement. Up to half of the career expatriate officers have decided to resign before the hand-over.

“Our oath is to the queen,” Lisle says. “A lot of people simply don’t want to work for the Chinese. They’ve had a good time of it. Now they’re finished.”

Of the few hundred British officers who fill the top spots in Hong Kong’s 28,000-strong Royal Police force, many have come here from other lost colonies, embracing the icons of the empire. Soon, though, the Union Jack waving atop the flagpole outside the station will be replaced by China’s red flag; the force will no longer be “Royal”; the police badges will not bear a crown.

Though the police band will still dress in MacIntosh tartan, it will probably give up a favorite march composed in honor of police killed in a border clash with mainland Chinese soldiers in 1967. Next year, the Chinese military will have an outpost in Hong Kong and work alongside the police in emergencies.

Such changes rankle proud traditionalists. The combination of patriotism, distrust and a golden handshake has prompted an exodus of older officers, who variously declare themselves ready to retire to tend roses in Devon, England, open a safari park in Zambia or farm in Hong Kong’s New Territories.

Those who leave now will receive up to $200,000 in cash; those who stay must finish their full careers to receive the pension. “If you had the choice of cash in hand now or counting on the Chinese to reward you down the road for your long service to the queen, which would you choose?” asks one officer. “I’m not a gambling man, I’ll take the cash.”

The odds are different for Hong Kong’s local officers, who are paid less but eventually will take over the expatriates’ posts on the force. Only 1.5% of the Hong Kong-born police have resigned, but the likelihood of changes under Chinese rule are still a concern. One detective who quit quietly describes his decision.

“As police, we’re supposed to stay neutral--not join any marches or sit-ins,” he says, describing the fevered atmosphere in Hong Kong in 1989 after soldiers in Beijing brought a bloody end to pro-democracy protests in the Chinese capital. “But . . . there were 1 million people marching in the streets, and I couldn’t help it--I had to join. I decided then I didn’t ever want to face off with Hong Kong people just because China said to.”

To allay such fears, the British government has offered all Hong Kong police the right to live in Britain and created a little-talked-about scheme to whisk officers in sensitive positions, such as criminal intelligence, out of the territory if they believe their job has jeopardized their safety.

And just as some locals fear that working for the Crown could be a liability, British officers who serve a Communist sovereign through Hong Kong’s autonomous government after the hand-over say it may hurt their job prospects back in Britain. British civil servants and their extended families must be investigated for government posts to ensure that their loyalty is unquestionable.

One high-ranking officer recently quit to protect his son, who is attending a military academy in London, from suspicion.

But it is the intrigue of this unusual outpost that drew new officers like Lisle here from the streets of London, and that keeps some old hands from giving it up. While gleaming Rolls-Royces troll the city’s neon-lit streets, a petty scramble of gambling, prostitution and drugs hums in the shadows.

The gritty streets vibrate more with chance and chicanery than with danger. Tattooed gang members can be found in both boardrooms and back alleys, but aside from an occasional outburst of inter-gang violence, largely keep their crime to themselves.

Hong Kong’s geography--the colony abuts China--creates a wildly varied range of duties: from patrolling the border with infrared equipment to detect illegal immigrants, to delivering the occasional baby by Chinese women who dash across the border when they are about to give birth so their children will be born on Hong Kong soil. Marine Police chase pirates and smugglers in speedboats, and Special Forces put down sporadic riots at camps for Vietnamese migrants desperately resisting a forced return home.

And Hong Kong’s position in history makes it difficult to separate the quotidian from the political, much though people would like to. This week, the Wan Chai district police buffered top Beijing leaders from protests, worked on security plans for the June 30 hand-over ceremony and practiced riot control in anticipation of political unrest.

In the Wan Chai police headquarters, a stolid, whitewashed building with square pillars and breezy verandas, Chief Supt. A. K. McLoughlin muses about staying on after 1997. The well-traveled son of a British Royal Air Force officer, his “itchy feet” and inbred patriotism brought him to Hong Kong 26 years ago.

He arrived at a time when the police acted more like soldiers, when China’s Cultural Revolution chaos bled into the territory. He witnessed the pervasive corruption in the 1970s, when the force earned a reputation as “the best police money can buy.” He watched the force’s top ranks become more integrated in the 1980s and is now counting down to the end of the empire.

“I’ve worn the royal cap and badges for 26 years,” he says, gesturing to the silver crowns that adorn his sharp black uniform. “When we lose them, it will be a very sad moment.”

Later, McLoughlin raises a beer with a colleague and recounts the Royal Mess Hall drinking tradition. “A toast to the Queen . . . and pass the port from the left,” he says.

He is unsure whom they will toast in the future. “We’ll be told who to toast, I suppose.”