Recent studies suggest that the pandemic has impacted criminal activities and organized crime groups. This article provides a qualitative review of changes in crime rates, patterns, and activities of organized crime groups (specifically, Triads) in Hong Kong. Three specific types of organized crimes with high Triad involvement were selected: serious violent crimes, serious drug-related crimes, and smuggling. After analyzing both official and non-official sources, the results showed that despite the government's stringent control measures that significantly suppressed socio-economic activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, the figures for these selected crimes rose tremendously. Triads' organized criminal activities became more frequent, dangerous, and aggressive, posing a severe threat to Hong Kong's law and order.

Hong Kong government is planning to legislate a new law that can fight against digital wildfire fake news. Hong Kong has faced two waves of fake news digital wildfires in the past few years: The 2019 social unrests in Hong Kong and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The city has witnessed how fake news can undermine social trust and social cohesion, causing large-scale damage to both societies and governments. Fake news brings substantial damage to society due to the erosion of the credibility of governments, rule of law, and the democratic system’s human security. The government’s announcement of legislation has received criticisms and objections. One of the main objections is that the current laws are sufficient to combat against fake news, hence new legislation is not necessary. Yet, our study shows the contrary. We studied laws that have been used by the prosecution to deal with publication and speech related public-order crimes, which are within the Hong Kong National Security Law, the old common law offence Outraging Public Decency, and Crime Ordinance. The study results show that those laws are either outdated or applicable to deal with current fake news problem. Therefore, we argue that a contemporary fake news legislation is indeed needed, but the government should study thoroughly about how the new law can strike an equilibrium between civilian’s freedom and public safety. Keywords: Fake news; Public-order crimes; Criminal liability; False information; Freedom of speech.

Hong Kong has just experienced unprecedented social unrest that started in 2019. The unrest dragged the city into a chaotic situation that had not been seen in the last 50 years. Violence and crimes occurred across every corner of the territory, affecting every citizen's livelihood. Several studies have been carried out, analyzing its social, economic, and political causes. However, most of them are limited to the political scope, and there is no profound work comprehensively reviewing and organizing the security impacts against citizens in Hong Kong. In that case, this article aims to fill up this missing gap by exploring its impacts on personal and community security that are adhered to the human security concept and framework. The article lists several critical personal and community insecurities and threats, which were respectively (1) group conflicts and increasing crime rate, (2) the legitimacy issue caused by the distrust among citizens and authorities, (3) psychological stresses that endanger public mental health and (4) violent political radicalization that could potentially trigger future hate crime and violent extremism. Thus it argued that the community stakeholders and government shall first mobilize their resources on handling these issues and shall introduce multipronged, peaceoriented and sustainable policies to handle them in a cost-effective and timely manner.