Founding of Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption
By the early 1970s, Hong Kong's police force was pervasively corrupted by payments from Triad secret societies operating illegal gambling, prostitution and drug rackets, a systemic arrangement in which officers up to senior rank shared in the proceeds of protection they provided to organized crime. The arrangement was exposed dramatically in 1973, when Chief Superintendent Peter Godber was found to hold assets equivalent to several times his lawful earnings; given a week to explain the discrepancy, he slipped out of the colony before he could be arrested, triggering a wave of public protest, including a mass rally in Victoria Park, at the government's apparent inability to police its own police. The colonial government responded by creating the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) on 15 February 1974, an anti-corruption body deliberately structured outside the police chain of command and reporting directly to the Governor, which secured Godber's extradition from Britain and his 1975 conviction. Over the following decades the ICAC's sustained investigation of the police-Triad relationship substantially broke the systemic protection arrangements that had let Triad societies, descended from Qing-era anti-Manchu brotherhoods such as the Tiandihui, operate openly through police complicity, pushing surviving Triad groups toward less overt and more clandestine criminal activity.
- Year: 1974 CE
- Category: Political
