Community policing and ethnic minorities' inclusion: Integrating the South Asian residents in Hong Kong & Insights for Taiwan

Hong Kong is one of many metropolitan cities in Asia. Its permanent residents are more culturally diversified than other Asian counterparts, with more than 8% of non-ethnic Chinese inherited from the British colonial legacy, in addition to the Anglo-Saxon, several clusters of Ethnic Minorities (EMs) with South Asian ethnic background. This brought diversity to the territories but also issues of social management due to the divergence of culture and customs, and not a small number of them are economically and socially underprivileged in the mainstream Chinese community. This paper explores the interactions between the police and EM clusters from a community policing perspective: What were the problems identified by the police, and what have they done for 'crime prevention' purposes? The 'Project Gemstone', aimed at integrating the EM into local communities in 2013, is examined to explore the EM inclusion attempt by the Hong Kong Police. This study in the Asian Hong Kong context reminds the significance of contextual sensitivity to the design and implementation of EM policing and inclusion strategies. It also lets us rethink the concept of community policing which originated and was hypothesized in Anglo-Saxon democracies. The findings also provide insight into the policing authorities of Taiwan in the face of a more pluralistic & mobile population shortly. Copyright © 2023 National Chung Cheng University Department of Criminology.