Red259

I don't think they have the manpower to devote to that. Keep in mind this is among some of the busiest airports in the entire world. I noticed for some of the protests in the city they had to pull airport police to help cover those.

TA

I would guess it would be less than 30 officers needed to stop traffic along the road and look in every car, bus. And a lot of profiling. Anyone of a certain age, demographic, wearing certain clothing, carrying certain bags (or no bags) would be immediately diverted and asked to show further identification.

Kilian Zoll

HK Police appears to be utterly useless and incapable of handling the situation -- both on the streets of HK and in the airport. In any other country the airport situation would have been dealt with swiftly -- mass arrests and then blocking all entry points to the airport island, only allowing people with passports and boarding passes/confirmed flight itineraries to enter.

I get the strategy of selecting the airport as the site of these protests as it will garner more international media attention, and the risk of the police cracking down violently is smaller while the world is watching. That being said, given the developments of the past couple of days it appears to have backfired. Everyone I talk to these days are condemning the protester violence as absolutely inexcusable, and it appears Western media (at least non-Anglo media) have moved from portraying the events as 'freedom fights' to a more 'mob violence' angle in the past 24 hours or so.

My main concern at this stage is that the HK Police seems incapable of dealing with the situation -- I certainly hope they will sort it out and not call for 'back-up' from the Mainland, in which case thing could escalate quickly.

tentseller

KZ:
Very easy to implement vehicle checks as there are already toll plazas.

Airport is air conditioned, sitting there beats running around the streets for the protesters.
Western media has turned against the protesters due to the mob situation and travellers being inconvenienced to harassed.

HK Police has called for and got reinforcements in leadership as two retired senior officers are back on contract.
重出江湖

tentseller

https://www.hongkongairport.com/en/important-notice/index.page?noticeid=1565759853171-1

Injunction active.

tentseller

There are also a few petitions supporting law and order circulating around HK social medias.

christep

Just to be clear, no lethal force has yet been used in these HK protests. No-one has died. No lethal armaments have been fired.

RCyyz

In 2018 HKG handled 74.7 million passengers. Assuming a completely uniform distribution, this works out to 204,657 pax per day. Trying to sift pax from protestors means inspecting an awful lot of people. If such an inspection takes 6 seconds (0.1 minutes) this would mean 20,466 minutes = 341 man-hours just to find the pax. And that's just the pax in 1 day. And that's a 6-second search which, pragmatically, is next to useless.

To effectively search people arriving at HKG would, I think, require much more than 30 officers.

Red259

Agreed. What they ended up doing is what I had anticipated. They put up metal barricades at the entry point to departure terminals where you have to walk through one of those metal fence queues. They are checking ids/boarding passes of people before letting them into departure terminal.

TA

I find it entertaining to estimate, if you're game, and I find that it is not unreasonable. Your calculation above didn't take into account the number of hours in a day.
Here's mine:

• 74M passengers per year
• Equals 203k per day
• But not all are originating from HKG and require screening, let's say 2/3 are -- this gives 134k per day
• Most of those passengers will come in certain hours, let's say 18 hours of the day, equals 7400 pax per hour
• If it takes as you say 0.1 minute per passenger, that requires 12.4 hours of work per hour -- so 12 people to do the screening

I'm just estimating that ballpark, it's not crazy. We can change / correct the input numbers to our hearts' content and see if it still sounds sane.

Steve M

Money, for one. Plus, once you pass through exit Immigration into the airside departures area, you either have to actually take your flight, or get special dispensation from Immigration to undo your exit and get back into Hong Kong. That is, unlike all of the other protests so far, people wouldn't be free to come and go as they please. There are anecdotal reports of this taking awhile just to discourage the few arriving passengers that falsely go through transit security just to use a departure lounge as an arrivals lounge. I would imagine that the process could be made very inconvenient and time consuming for those doing so as a form of protest.

Not necessarily. One method used in protest situations is to arrest people to gain immediate control of the situation, and then later release them without charge. Those arrested never get their day in court, but the situation is dealt with. And, a short time in jail can serve as a deterrent even if it doesn't result in a criminal record. Note that I'm not commenting on the Hong Kong situation specifically, but just responding in general to the notion above.

889

"Very easy to implement vehicle checks as there are already toll plazas."

What toll plazas? There are none in the airport complex. Or do you plan to check at the bridge those heading to Tung Chung and Disneyland, as well? How? Maybe mouse ears will get you through?

Seems awfully easy for protesters if they want to gum up the new checks by massing right in front of the checks. Or at the employee entrance. Or across the access highway. Etc. The airport wasn't designed to defend against this.

hawaiiansports

they wouldn't be anonymous anymore.

CX HK

To provide some context: There are indeed Chinese troops ("PLA") station in HK, this has been true since 1 Jul 1997. They have more than one base, and occasionally they move around from one base to another. Hence, some of these videos are real, but are not an uncommon occurance over the past 22 odd years.

889

I've just received a surprising email from Shipbao -- one of those firms that tranships stuff into Hong Kong -- advising that because of increased Customs restrictions, "sensitive" goods should not be sent into Hong Kong.

This includes such common items as umbrellas, black T-shirts, gloves, masks, "etc".

https://www.shipbao.com/information/news_detail/id/415 (in Chinese)

Whether this is a formal Customs rule affecting all or just Shipbao, a Mainland enterprise, being conservative, who knows.