Crime Law Soc Change DOI 10.1007/s10611-013-9496-0 Hong-Kong-style community policing: a study of the Yau Ma Tei fruit market Jeffrey T. Martin & Wayne W. L. Chan # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract This paper explores the policing of a traditional wholesale fruit market located in a densely populated neighborhood of urban Hong Kong. Based on ethnographic and historical research, we outline the political arrangements that govern the discretionary arrangements of police power at the market. A historically developed system maintains an informal status quo against various pressures to change. We identify crucial features in the contemporary policing system that emerge from a fusion between the democratic ethos of community policing ideals and non- democratic aspects of local administration in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. These features of this historically developed mode of order-maintenance, we suggest, might be seen as broadly characteristic of a “Hong Kong style” community policing. Introduction: function vs. history Hong Kong likes its fruit: government statistics estimate the city’s consumption at over 1,500 tons per day [2]. Distributing this perishable commodity is a big business, organized almost entirely through two wholesale markets: the Western Wholesale Food Market on Hong Kong Island and the Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market in Kowloon [1]. Despite their functional equivalence as wholesale fruit markets, these are two quite different institutions. The Western Market is a new creation, engineered and run by the government to move a billion Hong Kong dollars of fruit every year. The Yau Ma Tei market, by contrast, is a messy, opaque, historically developed institution run by a traditional merchant’s association. Remarkably, the traditionally organized Yau Ma Tei market manages to move more than twice as much fruit as the government’s market. J. T. Martin (*) Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, Room 928, 9/F. The Jockey Club Tower, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] W. W. L. Chan School of Arts and Social Sciences, The Open University of Hong Kong, 30 Good Shepherd Street, Homantin, Kowloon, Hong Kong.