Hong Kong police stop-and-search tactics questioned after 1.6m spot checks last year

Hong Kong police carry out four times as many identity checks and on-the-spot searches as their counterparts in New York and London, official figures show, even though the effectiveness of the procedure appears to be in sharp decline.

Police in the city carried out 1,637,334 stop-and-search checks on pedestrians last year, according to figures released by the force. A further 345,917 people were stopped and questioned.

Experts on criminal law say the frequent searches could lead those searched to doubt the credibility of the police, while activists said members of ethnic minorities, especially South Asians, were more likely to be stopped and searched.

David Weisburd, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University in Washington, who co-authored a study published earlier this year that analysed millions of individual checks, said such actions were likely to have contributed to a reduction in crime over the last decade, but that they had unintended negative consequences.

"Whatever the number, [stops and frisks] are a type of strategy that is likely to lead to long-term negative consequences in evaluations of police legitimacy," he said after studying the Hong Kong data. "And police legitimacy is a key issue for the police."