In 1974, the Hong Kong Police implemented reforms to improve police-public relations and engage the community in crime prevention. Twenty-eight years later, police-public relations have improved. A large part of this may be attributable to the uprooting of syndicated police corruption. In 1995, the Hong Kong Police launched an initiative to establish a customer-service culture. Achievements so far have been negligible with little prospect of future improvement. The meager achievements of the community policing initiatives in Hong Kong stem from two sets of factors. The first factor is the problematic nature of the community policing model itself. The failure of the initiative to engage the public in crime prevention is unsurprising since it has been widely reported elsewhere as well. The second factor is the disregard of local conditions. The problems of social division for the initiative are rendered more acute by the local population’s socio-cultural ethos. The Hong Kong Police institutionalized traditions do not dispose it towards prioritizing police-public relations. Whereas instilling the service ethos has also been found to be difficult elsewhere, the situation in Hong Kong is again aggravated by the specific context of the police’s paramilitary traditions and the unique political and economic position of Hong Kong. This study illustrates how and why policymaking should always take into account local conditions instead of simply borrowing foreign models. 6 notes, 53 references