What Kills Us this Week!

It's very early in the week to be doing this, but no one seems to care about this one so I feel I have to say something:

Late last week, a young police officer shot and killed an old homeless Nepali guy. The old man was armed with a chair and did try to attack him, but shooting him in the head? Wayyy excessive, yes?

Anyway, another guy further up the hill saw the whole thing and recorded it on his cellphone, and, although the quality is appalling, you can now see it on youtube:



The first shots you hear are the pepper-spray, which you can see doesn't slow the old guy down for a second. And you can hear the policeman giving instructions too, and then ... well, you don't see the man get shot although you can definitely hear the two shots being fired.

But for those of us who don't speak Chinese, what's really horrible - and what makes this into a Threatdown - is that the instructions, as you can hear for yourself, are all in Cantonese which the Nepali man didn't speak, yet the police are now saying, since this is China, they still count, in the police books, as instructions being given, which mitigate this shooting altogether.

I think there should be a court ruling on that one, because if it goes by without reproof, it's set a precedent and all of us who don't speak Cantonese are screwed.

However, I don't think anything will be done about it. If you go into youtube and look at the stat. counter, no one's visiting. Hard to believe that "Terminal Rage" - the Mainland woman throwing a temper tantrum at Lap Kok Airport - got over 5 million hits, while this one - up now for four days - when I exacted the code three minutes ago, had only 139. Hong Kong really doesn't care and so it's just going to be allowed to lapse.

Also, what I find sad is that, since this guy is Nepali, he definitely would once have been a Gurkha, and old soldiers definitely deserve better than this, even if they are homeless and insane.

And while not totally changing the subject, it all reminds me of the occasion more than a decade ago, when my nephew was stabbed in a nightclub in Cairns, in North Queensland. See, what happened was that a "loco" Spanish tourist was hassling a girl so Kele stepped in to protect her and, yeah yeah, since this is Kele we're talking about here and we all know what he's like, he was having a little too much fun with the incident and giving wayy too much 'smart-mouthing' and so ... well, it all enraged Enrico so much he pulled out a knife and stabbed Kele through the ribs and up into the lung.

And here's where it gets similar to this Nepali shooting. Because Enrico said "I'm going to kill you!" in Spanish, a language Kele didn't speak, the police said didn't count as "statement of intent" and so the entire episode became "misdemeanour battery" - the equivalent of stomping on someone's toe - and Enrico got off.

So what this means is that, here in Hong Kong, if you don't speak a language it still counts as "communication of intention" while in Australia it doesn't. Is that right?

THREATDOWN

Definitely, definitely, that this should not be a
legal ambiguity which means, until some ruling
has been made, we should all feel the need to panic.
Yes?

Update: The Police Commissioner himself has given his word that there will be a full and open inquiry into this shooting and that a ruling will be made on whether instructions given in a language you don't speak legally counts as communication.

Will let you know what happens with this since it's so very important!