Tom Hunter
No Minister
Collateral damage is the famous term developed by the US military to describe the death and injury of civilians and the destruction of their property during a military attack, their deaths being unintended but foreseeable even when the military targets and objectives are entirely legitimate.
But almost all actions of the state, not just the military ones, involve collateral damage, although it’s usually more in the area of fiscal damage. But ‘free’ public healthcare means people will die while they wait in the rationing queues (rather than because they have no insurance or other money). Public education increasingly means children held to the lowest common denominator and treated as public commodities (as the Covid crisis showed). Public housing means a greatly increased chance that you’ll be living with shitty neighbours who make your life a misery:
My parents are not only lifelong Labour voters but also long-term party members with a long family history in the Labour movement … they’ve been viciously betrayed by this govt … having voted left all my life, I swung into non-voting at the last election.
And public transport means an increased chance of being injured or murdered because you’re more exposed to the scum of the Earth:
Four teens have been acquitted of participating in the murder of a University of Auckland PhD student who was found at a bus stop last year with a deep, unsurvivable machete wound to his head.
The same defendants, however, were convicted of aggravated robbery and manslaughter.
…
The verdicts followed three days of closing addresses in which defence lawyers unanimously placed blame for the killing on a fifth defendant who earlier pleaded guilty to murder.
You get out of a car with one of your group holding a machete but you don’t realise that could lead to murder? You don’t try and dissuade him: “Bro, drop the machete, we can just bash him to get his stuff”?
Well, if this is your background of course you don’t:
Of the five teens, three had documented histories of robbing people using knives. In the month before the homicide, two of them had been involved in four incidents involving machetes. During a dairy robbery in Manurewa, one defendant hit a passerby with a machete, “cutting him almost to the bone”, prosecutors pointed out.
They’ll be out on bail in a few years, still young, and now with a better knowledge of how to kill. As the prosecutor said, in a likely hopeless plea for them to be convicted of murder:
What is it that binds them?” he asked jurors. “What brings them together? What do they have in common?… It cannot be a coincidence. It simply cannot be that three people, all sharing the same propensities, are in the same car that night with a machete … It’s no accident. It’s by design… There’s no other plausible explanation. Their propensities are why they are together that night.
I don’t usually cover NZ stories, let alone crime stories, but this one sticks because I often drive pass this particular bus stop and I can guarantee you that Kyle has not been forgotten.
Yet!
But when we read of their convictions on future violent crimes, in which their past and names may be revealed, we’ll see the name Kyle Whorrall and ask ourselves, Oh yes. Now who was he?
This article was originally published by No Minister.
