Police find the Triad gangs perennially active in the sale of narcotics, just as they are in pimpery, extortion and shakedown rackets. Congested areas such as Yau Ma Tei and Sham Shui Po have the highest crime rates and the largest Triad membership. Only about five percent of the 500,000 Triad members are engaged in major crimes, yet the threat of vengeance from this militant minority is generally sufficient to keep the other members silent and submissive. The mere implication of Triad backing, in a threatening letter sent to a rich Chinese, usually produces cash to pay off the letter writer, although police have recently had more success in persuading prospective victims of these menaces to contact them instead of paying off. Kidnapings are rare, though at least one case made the headlines in 1961. The makeup of the police department closely reflects both the hierarchy and the numerical grouping of the colony’s population. The line force of uniformed men and detectives in all grades totaled 8,333 in 1961. Nine-tenths were Chinese and less than 500 were British, with less than 200 Pakistanis and a handful of Portuguese. The top 50 administrative posts were almost solidly British, however. The force also includes a civilian staff of 1400. For the purposes of the ordinary citizen, a colony cop is a Chinese cop, for these are the only officers he sees regularly. Taken as a group, they are an alert-looking, smartly uniformed body, predominantly young, slim and athletic. Day or night, they appear to be very much on the job, and the worldwide complaint that a cop is never there when you need him seems peculiarly inapplicable to Hong Kong. The Chinese officer quite obviously is proud of his job, but the swaggering bully-boy pose is alien to his nature. A few Chinese officers, like police in all other cities, go bad. When they are drummed out of the force, it is generally for shaking down a hawker or a merchant. More serious cases involve the protection of gambling, prostitution, after-hour bars, or even collaboration with Triad gangsters who split their protection money with the man on the beat. Once in a great while a case like that of Assistant Superintendent John Chao-ko Tsang crops up, with a high-ranking Chinese officer involved in spying for a foreign government—Communist China, in this instance. But such is the exception and does not change one lesson the British rulers have learned in 120 years of hiring almost every kind of recruit from a Scotsman to a Sikh; that of them all, the rank-and-file Chinese cop is the finest the colony has ever had. The command structure of the police department, which is highly centralized under an all-British top administration, is reflected in almost every branch of the colony government. There are approximately 15,000 natives of the British Isles in the colony, excluding members of the armed forces and their families, and they occupy virtually all of the top government posts.