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In the 1974 Po Sang Bank robbery case, a robber held hostages captive and was in a deadlock with the police for more than 20 hours. This case led to the establishment of the Police Negotiation Cadre (PNC) the year after, with the aim of saving lives and resolving crises through negotiation.
In an interview with OffBeat, Chief Superintendent Wong Kwong-hing shared the development of PNC over the years. He joined PNC in 1999 and became the fifth Commanding Officer of PNC in 2010, leading PNC for nearly 12 years.
“PNC is a special unit, and we have a very unique interview selection process. Examiners will ask unexpected questions to test applicants’ response and wisdom. In a particular recruitment exercise, we selected less than twenty candidates from a few hundred applicants,” he said.
PNC is a volunteer secondary duty cadre with 102 members. In addition to their regular police duties, PNC members devote their spare time to perform shift duties for the cadre because they find the work of PNC very meaningful.
Wong Kwong-hing has joined the PNC for 22 years and handled close to a thousand cases. When recounting one of most memorable cases, he said, “I was responsible for negotiating with the South Korean farmers who staged protests during the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in 2005. Due to the language barrier, I relied on the translators to convey my messages to the protesters. Throughout the negotiation process, I maintained eye contact with the representative of the protesters to express my sincerity and to build trust, hoping that they would keep their promises and exercise restraint during the protests.”
As an expert negotiator, he went through the phase of accepting failures. He still remembers a teenage girl who released her fingers one by one on the grip of the barbed wire and threw herself off the building. Wong Kwong-hing said, “We have to remind ourselves constantly that we cannot overestimate our abilities and we could only try our best to impact lives.”
Wong Kwong-hing’s office is filled with souvenirs from different police organisations around the world and these souvenirs recorded how he had led PNC towards the path to internationalisation. In the past 22 years, he and other PNC members participated in many conferences of the International Negotiators’ Working Group to exchange views with overseas police officers and experts. Up until now, the professionalism of the Hong Kong PNC is highly regarded internationally. The cadre also provides training for other local disciplined services, mainland public security officers and overseas police.
Since 2012, PNC has organised the Postgraduate Diploma in Public Order Studies (Crisis Negotiation) with the School of Professional and Continuing Education of the University of Hong Kong. The course became the first Force accredited programme with credit exemption and was awarded level 6 qualification under the Qualifications Framework which is equivalent to master’s level. Many negotiators joined the course over the years. As the course facilitator and trainer, Wong Kwong-hing has enhanced the professionalism of PNC and its internal training accreditation.
Wong Kwong-hing will retire at the end of this year. In the book, “Negotiation – the 45 years of the Hong Kong PNC”, Wong Kwong-hing shared more stories about working in PNC. He encouraged PNC members to uphold the cadre’s motto “Who Cares Wins” to continue to serve citizens with empathy. Looking back on his 22 years of service with PNC, he said his efforts were not in vain.
