to help or not to help

the murder of darren kang had given rise to 2 issues which i would like to highlight on, namely, public’s apathy and double standard by the police.

1) public apathy. i wonder how come nobody went to darren’s help when he was helplessly attacked by so many men. the attack happened at a busy popular place. there were many people who witnessed the attack yet they decided to mind their own business. as a result, a young man was killed.

anyway ok, understandably, it would be suicidal for an individual person to go to darren’s help, but why can’t a group of people intervened to stop the attack? instead another group of people came to further attacked darren! this i can’t understand. the report said there were 3 groups of people who attacked darren. why would the other 2 groups attacked him? the first group, they were the one who provoked darren and started the attack so it is understandable. but i heard the 3rd group was just passing by in a car, when one of the metal chairs used to attacked darren get in their way. and they came out of the car… to bash darren… as if he was the one who threw the chair. they should bashed darren’s attackers instead! maybe they are friends of the 1st group.

i’m not surprised that nobody went to darren’s help. people were just too scared to get involved. who knows, if a person went to darren’s help, he might get attacked too. or each one of them might be thinking “why me. let the others help him.” this is what we call the bystanders effect. everybody’s waiting for somebody’s else to take action (see my blog about this matter here). more so when it was a dangerous situation. everybody (including me) are more worried about thier own skin, then others skin.  there’s a chinese saying that goes ‘do good, no good returns’ (or something like that… don’t know how to translate!). it basically means when we do a good deed, something bad will happen to us. for example, the case of the man who helped a snatch thief victim by chasing after the thier.  well he was doing a good deed but he got killed in return, hence ‘do good, no good returns’.

2) on the matter of double standards, citzen nades of sun2surf  had a good write-up on it. it is regarding one of the witnesses who happened to be the son of a cabinet minister.

i find it quite amusing that the police had said “we are waiting for him to show up” while the other witnesses, the restaurant workers, were at once rounded up and hauled to the police station.

wow! police waiting for a witness to show up? gee, of course for this instance, it has only to be a VIP witness (or son of a VIP)… only then the police will ‘wait’. and the police dare to tell us there’s no favouritism (double standard) involved. it’s already plain as can be when the police itself remarked “we are waiting for him….”. and do you know on the day of the identifcation by darren’s fiancee, he was suppose to turn up but he didn’t, and poor darren’s fiancee had to spend almost the whole day in the police station waiting for this son of a VIP to show up. 

UPDATED on 21/7/04 12:52 AM – the darren kang site.