Report: Hong Kong Police Abused ‘Mentally Incapacitated’ Protester

Riot police enter the shopping mall to disperse the protesters during the Labor Day in Hon
AP Photo/Kin Cheung
Gabrielle Reyes

Hong Kong police officers allegedly assaulted an autistic pro-democracy protestor last Friday, violently shoving him to the ground and using pepper spray to incapacitate him, Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily reported on Thursday.

The man, reported to be in his 20s, was allegedly attacked by police on June 12 while attending a mass demonstration in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the city’s pro-democracy protest movement.

Hong Kong Southern District Counselor Tiffany Yuen, assigned to the case, said the man was not involved in any violent protesting and had “merely gotten off a bus in Causeway Bay” when he was suddenly assaulted and arrested by local police officers. According to the report, after his arrest, the man was taken to a nearby police station where he was left unaccompanied for over four hours. This was an excessive amount of time for the autistic man to be without proper adult supervision, especially following a traumatic physical assault, Yuen argued. The counselor said she contacted the man’s mother as soon as she was notified of his case.
According to Yuen, Hong Kong police are given explicit guidelines and training by the government on how to handle a Mentally Incapacitated Person (MIP) during an arrest. She questioned if the officers involved had properly observed those guidelines. By denying the man access to a qualified adult during his prolonged detention, the police defied a MIP guideline requiring officers to provide “notice to an appropriate adult.”

Speaking to Apple Daily, Hong Kong legislator Fernando Cheung said that “police [have] arrested a number of MIPs and denied them their rights to be accompanied by an appropriate adult or a social worker” since the pro-democracy protests began last summer. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement began last June in response to a now-scrapped bill that would have allowed Hong Kong nationals charged with crimes to be extradited to China for trial. The protests have now evolved into a wider pro-democracy movement.

Apple Daily is owned by Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon and one of the city’s most prominent pro-democracy activists.

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