Children activities at the Children’s Residential Home (CRH) of the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children (HKSPC) are captured by a total of 53 CCTV cameras (6 outdoors and 47 indoors). On receiving the complaint alleging malpractice against children under CRH care, HKSPC has been reviewing the relevant CCTV footage and has made two Police reports so far. We have also submitted, in support of our reports and to assist in the Police investigation, four batches of CCTV footage from a massive universe of raw footage. As an illustration, one of the batches of footage reviewed containing the recording of all activities of the children in CRH on both 2nd and 3rd floor for the period of 11th to 17th December involves 28 cameras and 2,800 hours of recording, and we have spent 78 man-hours to review it.
On Police request and to ensure suitable care for the children, we are releasing remaining CCTV footage to the Police.
We have started yesterday by turning over half of the remaining CCTV footage, covering all areas from 18th November to 17th December. The latest submission contains what was captured over the preceding month by 27 cameras installed at CRH (on 2nd and 3rd floor of HKSPC’s service building), with over 20,000 hours of recording and about 5TB of hard drive storage. We shall turn over the balance of the footage in batches as soon as possible.
So far, we have suspended or terminated 7 CRH staff members for suspected irregularities. Six of them have been subsequently arrested and charged by the Police. While we do not wish to see more children or staff members implicated, we understand that we must identify those who fail to comply with professional requirements and/or suspected of breaking the law. This is critically important to our work of protecting the children and sends a clear signal to all. We will continue to render full assistance to the Police in their investigation.
HKSPC has pledged to upgrade the taskforce (TF) and to conduct a credible, thorough review of all of our activities besides the CRH, including our day crèche, day nurseries, after school care, Children and Family Services Centres and pre-school rehabilitation services. We are pleased that the formation of the TF is close to completion and we should be able to announce details including its membership soon. Once set up, the TF will commence work immediately. Given the breadth of review, we are likely to undertake this in phases with CRH being the first facility to review. The comprehensive exercise, however, could be a longer process, but we will of course act upon TF findings and recommendations.
For the CRH, we have engaged risk solution specialist Steve Vickers Associates (SVA) to help expedite the review of the remaining CCTV footage. We sincerely hope there are no further issues, but if there are we will identify them and act accordingly. We have also appointed Deloitte to undertake a thorough review of our operations and processes in the CRH, to independently establish any shortcomings and areas for improvement with a target to complete this work before the end of January.
Once again, we are very sorry for what has happened. We owe all concerned an apology in particular the children and parents.
Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children
1 January 2022