The Hong Kong seller of luxury watches looked on in horror as masked men wielding the biggest sledgehammer he’d ever seen smashed through the door of a neighboring watch store, held a machete to the owner’s throat, scooped up hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of timepieces, and then scattered into the city’s maze of streets.
Less than two weeks later, armed robbers attacked again. This time, the watch merchants of Kowloon fought back.
Among them was the watch seller who had witnessed the previous robbery. He says he grabbed an iron pipe he had handy for just such a confrontation and sprinted out to join the battle against the robbers who were smashing the front of Past & Future Times with hammers, trying to get to
the store’s high-end watches, while other gangsters brandishing machetes formed a menacing shield around them.
“I heard ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ People shouting,” said the merchant, who asked that he be identified only by his surname, Pan, because he feared for his safety. So much so that he now keeps a large meat cleaver in the drawer of his front desk and has protected his store with a new double
door and toughened glass.
The robbers came at the merchants with their knives and then, seemingly scared off, ran away, he said.
“All the shops came out to help. We’re very united now,” Pan said.
They have to be. Hong Kong’s 30,000-strong police force has been so stretched by a half year of anti-government protests that it is struggling to keep the peace. Armed robbers and burglars are seemingly exploiting policing vacuums caused, in part, by the redeployment of officers to riot-
control duties. Police say the proud reputation of the semi-autonomous Chinese territory of 7.5 million people as an Asian haven of tranquility, with crime rates lower than other cities its size, is being eroded.
“We used to be a very safe city, six months ago, but somehow we face a lot of challenges,” said Chief Superintendent Kwok Ka-chuen, a spokesman for the police force.
Still, Hong Kong remains a city where visitors don’t need to think twice about venturing out at night. It had six times fewer homicides last year than New York, seven times fewer burglaries and 88 times fewer robberies.
