Adding insult to manslaughter

As if it's not bad enough that the cops have shot an innocent civilian and breached confidentiality agreements, the Plodders have to go and short-change the Naitoko family too.

The cops blurted all and sundry details yesterday with what was supposed to be a face-saving press release. Instead, they ended up looking like a bunch of bullies blundering through the delicate fields of raw emotion.

Nothing unusual there, of course. It's just that this time it's no villain they're tickling, it's a bone fide honest citizen's death and the hole left in their family. There's no Garth McVicar pantomime to plead their case in the media. These victims are too brown for that clown, eh.

If I read between the lines of that Police PR shill correctly, it's not a stretch to presume that the AOS button man shot what was believed to be the right man, due to either garbled communications, loud wops from the Eagle chopper fogging the Comms, or institutionalised racial assumptions. In Copthink, what were the odds that the white guy was bad and the brown guy was good?

Anyways, back to the cheap blue line. Aside from the thousand apologies still owed by the cops to the Naitokos, the NZ Police still owe the Naitoko family another three million, two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in blood money.

That is the difference between what the cops have coughed up so far, and the $3.5 million statistical value of a human life in NZ (2009 prices). This figure is used to plug everything from Joyce's Roads of Notional Significance through to the Drowning Toll, so I can't see why it isn't used to recompense manslaughter by the state as well.

Maybe Greg O'Connor could be useful for once and have a whip around his union for the shortfall.