The law is still the law

It is kind of sick that the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, Mohamed Nazri Aziz, would echo Inspector-General of Police Musa Hassan in saying that the parents of Nurin Jazlin Jazimin may be charged with negligence for failing to take adequate care of their daughter.

"The law is still the law. We have to act. No one can be exempted," the pompous idiot said. He went on to say that the police were only abiding by the principles of the Rukun Negara which require the citizens of the country to uphold the rules of law.

Come again? Am I reading it correctly? The police want to charge the grieving parents? Do they have their priorities right? Shouldn't the police be going after the killers of the parents' eight-year-old daughter?

Oh wait, I forgot. They are going after the killers but then, the killers are moving targets. Shadowy figures captured on the CCTV. No Candid Camera shots. Not so easy to track and trace. Meanwhile, we know where the grieving parents are staying, don't we? Wangsa Maju. They can be picked up at a moment's notice. Sorry, I didn't realise that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It's easier to pick on the parents instead of the killers.

Oh, but wait again. Maybe the police have a point, you know. Charge the parents for negligence. They should know better than to allow their children loose in the streets. How many times have we seen parents letting their children play in the streets with little or no supervision, with disregard to the traffic? How many times have we seen little boys and girls separated from their parents in shopping malls? These are incidents that contribute to accidents affecting children and crime against them.

So the police may be right, you know. Make the parents pay for negligence so that they'll know better. Let little Nurin's parents pay for their negligence so that their other three children will be safe, so that the people in Wangsa Maju will take greater heed of their children's whereabouts. Let them be an example so that others won't make the same mistake as them.

As if, in Nurin's parents case, as well as at least half a dozen more cases, the parents have not suffered enough. Yes, the parents may have been negligent to have let their child wander off by himself but the ordeal of having to deal with children that never come home is enough punishment for them, for their neighbours, for the community.