Police and the ‘Hooks’
Police and the ‘Hooks’
This chapter examines former prisoners’ experiences of being arrested and their views on the police officers who arrest them. With the example of the use of informants, which the former prisoners called ‘hooking’, it argues that the police officers’ concern for intelligence collection and meeting arrest quotas had overridden the concern for ‘saving the drug addicts’. The former drug detainees were exposed to the media presentation of ‘model police officers’ on the front stage and the actual practices of ‘hooking’ on the backstage simultaneously. It argues that this had contributed to their feelings of injustice and to a structural system of hypocrisy formed by the material circumstances of the prison as well as outside bureaucratic performance criteria like the arrest quota and different types of performance measurements linked to the daily police operation.
Keywords: Policing, Chinese police, informers, intelligence collection, criminal justice, drug control, corruptions
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