ABSTRACT
The scholarly study and research of policing has been an uphill battle1 worldwide. Hong Kong is no exception. To many police officers, policing is a vocation,2 better learned from peers, on the job and in the street rather than through scholars, from books and at the library.3 From the police perspective, the study and teaching of policing is best left to ‘insiders’ and ‘experts’. Here is a case in point:
At one of the author’s presentations at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) ‘Police Forum’ (3 September 2011), a young Ph.D. student related his experience with teaching police officers. A number of HKP officers challenged the Ph.D. student’s understanding of the HKP. They claimed the young teacher lacked personal experience and access to implicit knowledge of how policing works in practice.
