The Media Representations of Police Image: Research Notes on the Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement

The Hong Kong Police Force has undergone one of its biggest challenges in the Occupy Movement that emerged in the last year. Despite the sheer complexity of the police roles, we know little about its representations in the media coverage, and even less about the extent to which the imagery impacts of police acting as peacekeepers would have been made upon the images of police acting as crime fighters. Against this background, this empirical research aims to investigate the police image and its relation to the police’s specifically categorized duties in Hong Kong. The content analysis of local newspaper accounts is used as the research method. It is found that there would be generally negative media representations of police in the order-maintenance work whereas the police images in the crime-fighting duties could still remain positive. The reasons for these findings and their implications for the conceptions of the police role are discussed.