Hong Kong police warn drivers their illegal parking may be caught on video, amid clampdown on traffic offences
- Mobile video teams out in force on Tuesday targeting drivers flouting city’s traffic laws
- Motorists who avoid on-the-spot fines could still be penalised following review of police footage, chief inspector warns
Hong Kong police mounted a citywide operation against illegal parking and other traffic offences on Tuesday, warning drivers who broke the law but avoided on-the-spot fines they could still be penalised following a review of video evidence.
Mobile video teams were deployed for the enforcement operation, with one of them patrolling Sha Tin Centre Street to record instances of rogue parking.
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Chief Inspector Ko Chun, the acting district operation officer for Sha Tin, said double-parking drivers might not have received a penalty ticket at the time of the offence, but the law could soon catch up with them once investigations were completed.
“The benefit of enforcing the law by using mobile video recording is that we do not need to intercept the vehicles, so as to avoid unnecessary conflict,” Ko said, adding his mobile video team had issued 500 of the 40,000 traffic penalty tickets handed out in Sha Tin over the past two months.
Police rolled out the video technology in 2018 to tackle traffic congestion-related offences, with uniformed officers using video cameras to catch offenders in the act.
The team issued 11,459 fixed penalty tickets across the city last year, doubling the amount of 2019.
The figures were not yet available for Tuesday’s operation. In a similar three-week deployment in the west of Hong Kong Island last month, the team issued more than 6,300 tickets and towed away five vehicles that were causing serious traffic congestion.
Currently, the fine for illegal parking is HK$320, whereas the penalty for offences such as speeding and failing to comply with traffic signals ranges from HK$320 to HK$1,000 (US$129).
The number of fixed penalty notices and summons issued by police surged by a third between 2017 and 2020, from 2.4 million to 3.2 million.
