Straight Talk presenter Eugene Chan (left) interviews Assistant Commissioner of Police Catherine Kwan on TVB, June 27, 2023. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
Assistant Commissioner of Police Catherine Kwan is on the show this week.
Kwan shares with us how the smart policing strategy, leveraging artificial intelligence technology, is being deployed in Hong Kong to enable more efficient and effective services to the public.
Check out the full transcript of TVB’s Straight Talk host Dr Eugene Chan’s interview with Catherine Kwan:
Chan: Good evening! Thank you for joining us on Straight Talk. Our guest is Assistant Commissioner of Police, Catherine Kwan. Kwan has been with the police force since 1988, and has served in a variety of posts – both on frontline operation command as well as in administration, including the area of public relations and complaints. As the officer-in-charge of the Information Systems wing, Assistant Commissioner Kwan is going to share with us how smart policing ensures Hong Kong is a safe city. Welcome, Catherine!
Kwan: Glad to be here this evening, Eugene. Thank you!
Chan: I read in some of the database that Hong Kong is ranked 18 out of 424 safest cities in the world. And we call that a safe city and, to our viewers, a safe city will mean a low crime rate, being able to walk down the street either during the day or night without having the fear of being robbed, mugged or even physically attacked. And it also means when we go home, we know that our house won’t be broken in and a low crime rate. And one of the reasons I'm sure it is because of the good work that has been by the force.
Kwan: Thank you.
Chan: And I know you have been to Geneva recently, and what has that got to do with ensuring Hong Kong as a safe city?
Kwan: Basically, the Hong Kong Police Force has promoted smart policing over the past few years. And in our context, smart policing refers to bringing in innovative and new technological solutions into our day-to-day police operations. Over the past decade, basically there has been a drastic change in the way that people communicate and receive service. To ride on this new age, the force will adopt digitization as our strategy, which actually started in 2019.
Chan: Then what were you doing in Geneva?
Kwan: Geneva Invention Award, actually. It is a contest that is open to the worldwide entities and all the companies to enroll and to showcase their digital solution and how that changed the lives of people. The Hong Kong Police Force is one of the agencies in Hong Kong that joined. We are among two hundreds of these companies, entities, academia and different units to join. We enrolled a few solutions. And this time is very special for us because we have this digitization policy being rolled out within the organization. So, we consider this as the occasion to showcase our technology, as well as to tell a good story about Hong Kong as well as the Hong Kong Police.
Chan: Catherine, since you mentioned smart policing, or someone called digital policing, what exactly are the strategies? What are you trying to achieve?
Kwan: Yes, since we have adopted this digital policing strategy in 2019, we have rolled out over 30 digital solutions, which we aim to achieve a few objectives. The first one is to enhance public service. We want to know how we could make it easier for the public to approach our service and how they could easily, you know, conveniently receive our services so that we could serve them better. The second objective is to enhance our operational efficiency, so that we could put the resources into more pressing areas, how we could streamline our work process, and optimize our resources. That is our focus. And the third objective is to enhance our investigative capabilities. As you may be aware, there are a lot of contemporaneous crimes that need technology to deal with, in particular such as cybercrime. And over the past few years, we brought up solutions and then we considered that we have saved some resources. And we also hope that the saved resources and manpower could be put on the beat so that the public will see us and they will feel safer.
Chan: Right, Catherine, thank you for outlining the objectives. But from the viewer’s point of view, say from the public point of view, any project that has involved them at all?
Kwan: Oh, certainly. Tell me Eugene, have you ever received an electronic parking ticket?
Chan: Unfortunately, yes.
Kwan: I'm sure you do. And like most viewers do. We rolled out this electronic parking ticket project in 2021. Like most viewers will know about that. But what most viewers don't know about is that there are alongside many digital solutions that involve case reporting, case handling and also beat patrolling that I would like to share with viewers tonight.
Chan: When you're talking about involving the public, apart from not so popular getting a parking ticket, although it is very fast, very efficient now, you get in your car if you have an illegally parked car. Anything that helps us to report cases to the police.
Kwan: Oh, yes, certainly. That is the first solution I'm going to talk about is self-service kiosks. It is a digital device, which is designed generally to facilitate digital reporting by the public, instead of manually handled by our offices. It's predominantly to help to do a lost property case report, as well as other cases on our e-platform, such as technology crime, deception, animal loss cases, noise complaint, traffic reports, as well as other nuisance calls, and which are basically around 14 types of cases.
Chan: Are you saying that we can actually do a report to the police without having to go to the police station?
Kwan: Oh, part and partial. Yes, that is something we want to achieve in the long run. But at the moment, we have these self-service kiosks being deployed at 12 busiest police stations in the territory, including Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui, Central, Yuen Long as well as some other divisions in the city.
Chan: And how popular has that been? I mean, have you seen many people reporting cases via these kiosks as you just said?
Kwan: The statistics explain it all, right? Since we will roll out this kiosk in 2021, we recorded 24,000 lost property cases being processed by the kiosks, which constitute 50 percent of those cases, come to these 12 district police stations. You may not be aware that around 46 percent of these members of the public come to our police station, they are just making a loss report. So, if the kiosks are in place, basically, our offices could deal with the other tasks instead of focusing on the kiosks on the lost property cases. And in view of the positive feedback of the kiosks, we have plans to roll out the kiosks in MTR stations in the longer run.
Chan: Right. So, that means reporting to police much easier, much more accessible by the public. I also want to ask you, since you mentioned all these service kiosks, I'm sure it involves a bit of digital handling with the machine. And Hong Kong, we do have an ageing population.
Kwan: Yes.
Chan: Do you see this as a disadvantage to them because not everybody is familiar enough to report a case at a kiosk rather than to talk to one of your actual officers on duty.
Kwan: Actually, we offer options for the public to make a report or to use our service. This is actually some of the essence we consider when rolling out digitization. For example, if you want to make a report nowadays, you can physically go to a police station, you could use our e-service platform, or you could use our self-service kiosks inside the police station if you don't want to wait. And we also consider the ageing population need, the digital literacy of the people using our services, we want to make sure everybody has the choice to get access to our service. So, the kiosk is one of the options for the public. And in the longer run, I believe, though there’s an ageing population, with the rise of the improvement of digital literacy, I'm sure people will get used to all the services.
Chan: Right, Catherine, so far, you have told us that you have this kiosk for case reporting. Unfortunately, I mean, our bad memory of getting a ticket, a parking fine. Anything else that is part of your initiatives?
Kwan: There’s a second solution I will talk about, that is the traffic accident handling mobile application. It digitalizes the process that the traffic officers have to handle, when they deal with a traffic accident damage-only cases, I'm sure Eugene, you, yourself could have experienced being stuck in a car when there is a traffic accident ahead.
Chan: Very often.
Kwan: And then you'll be very frustrated. With this new mobile application. It will save up to 32 minutes for each case that our officers handle, so that would save their time on the road, as well as alleviate the traffic congestion. And with the average number of 50,000 cases of minor traffic accidents recorded it is considered that the manpower saved arising from this app will be quite considerable.
Chan: Apart from that, how about … you also mentioned beat patrolling. I mean for most Hong Kong people, we want to see more police on the streets so we feel safer.
Kwan: Yes.
Chan: But we know that Hong Kong is undergoing sort of a manpower shortage issue. The whole of Hong Kong is short of people. So, will any such efforts help us in that aspect as well?
Kwan: Yes, in the context of beat patrolling. There is a new app developed by us which is very timely to save manpower, which we call the “electronic visiting book”. It is an app that replaces the paper book on the beat for offices to register the visiting location. The basic operation is that our officers just use the smart device to sweep against the NFC, that is the near-field communication tablets specially designed for this. And then it will take only 15 seconds for them to complete the process. And in other sense, that means they could have more time to deal with our business on the beat. And we have rolled out this new EVB app to the officers last year. And we also have these NFC tablets being planted in all MTR stations, there are over 250 tablets there. And in the longer run, we plan to have this EVB available on the service formation.
Chan: EVB stands for?
Kwan: EVB stands for electronic visiting book. And one thing is about the future of this electronic visiting book. We want to create it virtually, for example, if there is a robbery case that occurred on the beat, we will fill in the intelligence and information about the crime through the NFC tablets. So, when our officers just patrol past this tablet, their mobile device, through this like an EVB, will be virtually receiving the intelligence and that will greatly enhance the communication of the intelligence.
Chan: So, the officers walking by will know there could be something happening around the area.
Kwan: Exactly, exactly, without sweeping through the NFC, the EVB, but they will passively receive through the virtual EVB.
Chan: Catherine, let's have a break now and viewers do stay with us.
Assistant Commissioner of Police Catherine Kwan attends the Straight Talk show on TVB, June 27, 2023. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
Chan: Thank you for staying with us. We have been talking with Catherine Kwan about how smart policing in Hong Kong makes our city safe. So, Catherine, in the first half, we talked about all the initiatives that the police has started to help our reporting of cases, or even make our life a lot of more bearable, just in case there is an accident in front, we can get out of it quicker. One thing I want to just bring to your attention, I mean Hong Kong is an international city.
Kwan: Yes.
Chan: It has reopened, and one of our selling point of Hong Kong is we have got some beautiful country parks, and people do go for hiking. And you know, since COVID, we are getting a lot more hiking trips by friends. But we know that there has been, unfortunately, a few more mishaps that needed your rescue. Anything that all the digital things can help so that we feel a lot safer in hiking itself?
Kwan: Yes. Hong Kong is a beautiful place with a lot of country parks, and also green areas. And it attracts a lot of visitors going hiking, and even our own members of the public, after COVID and people are very health-conscious. And they go off to the mountains to do different things. In the rhyme of life-saving technology, we are very concerned about the certain rescue operations. How they are conducted, how we could improve the efficiency and effectiveness. As you just pointed out, there had been some unfortunate incidents occurred over the past few years. And there are also an increasing number of the search and rescue operations over the past few years. And basically we have an increase of 370 percent of these cases, from 2019 until now. And we also recorded an average of 1-2 deaths in 2022, and this is very sad. And also we feel very shocking as well. So, what we can do about it? So, the Hong Kong Police Force, we developed the “3Rs”: the rescue solution, we want to revolutionize how these search and rescue operations are to be conducted. This solution is open to other discipline forces to use as well. As you may agree, during the search and rescue operation, it is very manpower driven. And it is also very dangerous as well. It involves the police officers, involves the Fire Services Department, involves the Government Flying Services, as well as the Civil Aid Services. And it takes days and days to do the operation. So, with the “3Rs” solution, we create a digital composite platform, which involves a digital map, a digital camera, and also a digital watch, which compose of the 3 Rs. For the digital map, it is a self-developed live map, which gives the route about the rescue location. And for the rescue cam (camera), it gives the video footage of the rescue site, which directly feeds on the map and show to the command center.
Chan: Right.
Kwan: And for the rescue watch, it is a duo-satellite system on the watch, which gives the GPS location of the rescue team members.
Chan: Right, so all these 3Rs are actually worn by the actual rescue officer.
Kwan: For the R map, it is situated inside the command post, or the joint command post, what we call, or inside the command center. And for the watch, and also the camera, it is worn by the officers themselves when they do the rescue. And one thing about the R watch is very special, apart from the GPS location of the rescue team or the rescue member, it also gives the biometric data of the rescue personnel. For example, like the heartbeat. Because there were previous cases when the rescue team member was collapsed during the process, so it is quite important …
Chan: All these sound like a movie to me. I mean I can imagine all those movie scenes coming out with … I mean all the biometric data coming out, so that their safety is ensured.
Kwan: Of course, because it is actually on the beat already. It is actually being used and applied on the day-to-day basis. And it was widely used by the Civil Aid Services officers, our counterparts, and some of the fire services officers as well. And I was told that the CAS officers, they use this 3Rs solution quite widely during their exercise and also their practical field operations.
Chan: Right. This must be something very encouraging when you actually bring this to Geneva, isn’t it?
Kwan: Yes, certainly. For the Geneva Invention Award, we bring in some new things as well. Apart from the 3Rs solution, we have some additional feed, to make it like the search and rescue ecosystem. Because the 3Rs solution revolutionizes the way we do things, we engineer the resources. But we found that there are some technology things we need to add in. So, we add the SOS app, which is a mobile application, downloadable by members of the public. And that it connects the GPS location of the hikers and also their emergency contact, with a 999 call center. The second one is a signal radar, actually it detects the mobile phone signal in complex terrain, even without the network coverage. And in fact, it is a patent solution co-developed with a start-up company in the HKSTP platform.
Chan: Which is the Hong Kong (and Technology) Science Park, isn’t it?
Kwan: Exactly because you know, we signed a memorandum of understanding with them last September, and this is one of the few products that we’ve had.
Chan: Right. So, Catherine, so far you have talked about a few of the inventions that have won some prizes for Hong Kong. But for the viewers, so what … I think there is a reason why we have been told when we go for hiking, make sure you bring your telephone.
Kwan: Yes.
Chan: Make sure you have a back-up battery.
Kwan: Yes.
Chan: Just in case there is no signal in certain areas, you will be able to pick up those signals, isn’t it?
Kwan: Yes.
Chan: So, that makes life a lot safer for the hikers, and so much easier for the rescuers.
Kwan: Yes, exactly. But even without the signal, Eugene, I am going to talk about the third element in this Geneva Invention Award that we put in, that is the Rescue AI. This Rescue AI, it adopts artificial intelligence to analyze the hiker’s speed, to analyze the historical location where he has gone, and also through the deep learning model, just to predict where possible this hiker could have been. So that even without the signal, we could still predict where he has gone, and just to sharpen, and just to predict the exact location that we should conduct the rescue. And that would quickly enhance our efficiency. And finally, bring greater safety to the hikers.
Chan: So, certainly all these initiatives by the police and also our other rescue team members, is going to make hiking in Hong Kong a lot more safer, a lot more reassuring, even for the visitors, isn’t it?
Kwan: Yes, exactly. This is something we want to achieve because Hong Kong is an open city, we welcome visitors, and now a lot of free travelers come, they just follow the GPS, follow the map routes, and go wherever they like. And this is quite good reassurance.
Chan: Catherine, since you are here, there is another area I want to talk about is Hong Kong’s protect animals schemes. I am also one of the members of this scheme, Animal Watchers scheme. And you are the person who is in charge. Can you tell the viewers what the scheme has done to ensure the safety of pets? Because a lot of people didn’t realize in Hong Kong, we have a half population who have pets, and there are some issues to it, isn’t it?
Kwan: Yes, Eugene. There are a lot of pet lovers in the city, and prior to 2019, before the COVID, we know that according to statistics, there are over 220,000 number of households in the city who keep pets. So, the number is that many, so how we could work together with this population to prevent our animals suffering from cruelty? Because there are lot of people concerned about why the police they don’t have dedicated animal cop to deal with animal crimes. But in fact, in 2018, we had a dedicated crime team, apart from investigating other crime cases, they would also look into the animal crimes. And they are working in a 22 police district, so we got the resources there. But we also think about how we could use the community multi-sectors’ synergy to work on this anti-animal-cruelty issue. That is why we have the scheme.
Chan: Has the scheme been successful in your view?
Kwan: I would consider it very successful because since we’ve had this scheme enacted in 2021, we have arranged a lot of activities, and then through which we have a 4-point approach, being roll out through the publicity, through the education, through the investigation, and through the intelligence collection, we managed to engage 72,000 of people practically participate in our activities. And there are some interesting activities I would like to share with you, which is very different from other animal welfare groups. You might be aware that in the past few years, there have been some cases about the dog-poisoning cases, and then as a result of these dog-poisoning cases reported, our animal watcher captains and also the helpers in the community, which is more than 250, they were helping out in checking these spots, that would likely have the dog-poisoning residue there. And then actually their actions helped our crime team to do their job better.
Chan: Right, so, it is very important that the community is engaged with this program, and gathering intelligence is something that we are trying to achieve, isn’t it?
Kwan: Yes, exactly. And there are other scenarios, like last year we have some cases report with animal traps in the countryside. And then people made a report, and the AWP captains and volunteers, they would help out to do the follow-up intelligence collection, and give us useful information.
Chan: Right. Catherine, this has been a very informative session. And thank you for sharing with us what the force is doing to make Hong Kong safer, and also a more enjoyable city to live in. And development and implementation of digital solutions in smart policing is certainly in line with Hong Kong’s direction towards becoming a global innovation and technology hub. Have a great evening and see you next week.
