The idea behind this book – to analyse various aspects of the accountability of the Hong Kong police force in different contexts – is a good one. Unfortunately, the presentation and execution leave something to be desired. There is a problem with the theoretical focus, possibly because the concept of accountability is neither sufficiently well defined nor consistently applied throughout the book, which in turn contributes to a lack of coherence. The author struggles to control his material and the impression at various points is that one is reading unfiltered research notes on randomly selected topics. The first chapter, for example, is an account of the establishment of the Hong Kong police force in the 1840s, interesting in itself but bearing little relationship to the rest of the book. The Treaty of Nanjing is reproduced in full although its relevance to the current issues which the author seeks to analyse is unclear. A potentially important chapter on the police's use of force consists mainly of documents while, by comparison, another chapter on beat patrol deployment contains much more extensive and comparative analysis. Legislative Council documents and other sources which the author has consulted are listed and sometimes reproduced at length but there is no bibliography, an important omission since the author claims that this is the only book on post-1997 policing issues in Hong Kong. A lengthy quotation, correctly attributed to Gregor Benton (p. xvi), is repeated later in the book and attributed to me (p. 225). There are problems with structure and with the absence of a balanced comprehensive perspective. The book would have benefited from considerable pruning and a more careful approach to the use of material.

That said, Wong does address three sets of interesting issues. The first relates to the transition of the police from a paramilitary force under colonialism to community policing in the post-1997 era. Wong has useful material on the “Living the values” training programme which was designed to produce a very different kind of police officer from colonial days and which has been quite successful in doing so. There is also mention, although not sufficient development, of the increasingly political role of the police stemming primarily from its role in controlling the street protests which have become so prevalent and which represent the cutting edge of relationships between the police and the community in present-day Hong Kong. A second set of issues, scattered throughout the book, concerns the impact of critical events on police strategy. The arrest and detention for three and a half months of a Chinese resident with a valid US passport on suspicion that the passport was forged helps to fuel public debate over police powers; the shooting of a young constable in 2001 promotes discussion within the Force on the value of single or double beat deployment; a New Year's Eve celebration gets out of hand and results in scuffles between the police and the public, raising issues of crowd control and police procedures. These flashpoints provide a vignette of the police in action and Wong does well to relate them to wider questions about the complaint-handling system, about ways of making the police more accountable, and of levels of community satisfaction with police performance. A third set of issues, contained in a single chapter, describes the police role in preventing computer crime. Wong provides a useful account of how the police undertook new functions in this respect but the material on prosecutions and financial losses due to computer crime is dated.

There is no doubt that the questions that Wong raises about the police and accountability are important: the way in which the police interpret their role in the community could prove critical for the maintenance of civil liberties in Hong Kong. It is a pity, therefore, that the useful material contained in this book is so often drowned in a sea of documents and lengthy footnotes and is not presented in more accessible and analytical form. The diligent researcher will find sources and leads of value here, but he or she will have to dig for them. The author must bear some responsibility for the shortcomings in the presentation but so, too, must Ashgate who should have provided firmer editorial guidance.