The original Hong Kong police have their own children and family members among the demonstrators and have a difficult time being physically tough, particularly on the young HK demonstrators. Some as young as 10 have been arrested.<p>It's therefore purported that many of the HK Police are actually mainland military police who have been brought in to get tough. The uniformed don't wear identifying badges. Some of them will dress as demonstrators and mingle with them. The demonstrators can identify these infiltrators by their non-HK accent and by the fact that they don't know the Hong Kong public transit system. Their purpose is to identify demonstration leaders and disrupt plans. The CPP military police apparently don't care about spraying un-involved families with pepper spray or firing projectiles into the heads of demonstrators. You likely heard about one nurse, who was helping wounded demonstrators, losing an eye to a projectile fired by police at point-blank range. The infiltrators are also purported to be the instigators of fires and other of the more violent demonstrator actions in order to justify police acting and using clubs, rubber bullets and pepper spray, as well as arrest anyone they can grab.<p>This is all another shame. The pre-CCP Hong Kong police were among those of the highest integrity globally. Now, they are comprised of unscrupulous foreign agents whose objective is submission and suppression, and who are now, at least in this episode, ridiculed into retreat.
Police is never "shamed" into retreat. It takes decisions on tactical grounds, something that protestors, usually more emotional, fail to grasp.<p>A retreat usually means that they have the crowd where they want it.