KEY POINTS:
The New Zealand Police have not covered themselves with glory in the case of the abandoned little girl their Australian counterparts named Pumpkin.
The name, her compelling face and especially the film of her father leaving her at a Melbourne railway station last Saturday brought this case more
public interest than perhaps it held for the police initially, but the police had more reason than the public at that point to fear for the child's mother.
The police file on the child's deserter could have told them that a year ago he had attacked her mother with a knife during an incident in which the child was hurt.
The man, Nai Yin Xue, had held a kitchen knife to his wife's stomach as she held their daughter in her arms and he threatened to kill her.
For that he was convicted in the Waitakere District Court and told he would be sentenced if he offended again.
He did, in another violent episode this year that caused police to confiscate a sword and his passport. They had to drop criminal charges when his wife declined to give evidence.
When the police learned last weekend he had abandoned his child in Melbourne they also knew they had handed him back the sword and passport on the day he left and they could not locate his wife.
Still they were not moved to treat the case as more than a missing person investigation.
The police are not the only law enforcement agency to have unwittingly facilitated Xue's flight.
When he passed through Auckland Airport with his little daughter in tow there were court orders in force against him forbidding him from initiating contact with his wife or daughter.
But for an alert to appear on airport immigration screens, it turns out, a separate order preventing him removing the child from this country would have been necessary.
This is bizarre. If a person is subject to a domestic protection order preventing contact with a child the fact should be flagged for every law enforcement agency that might call up his name. To note only specific non-removal orders is ridiculously bureaucratic and shows how lumbering our uniformed services have become.
The performance of the police, though, surely reached its nadir in Keystone Ave, Mt Roskill, where Xue's car sat for six days outside the house of his missing wife with her dead body in the boot. For the last two of those days the car was sitting under the noses of the cops and they did not unlock the boot.
Had they done so, police in Los Angeles, where Xue had gone after leaving his daughter, would have been looking for a murder suspect rather than a desertion case that could not register high on their scale of offending.
Deputy Commissioner Rob Pope has defended the police investigation in general terms as best he can. He says he is satisfied it has followed normal procedure and "best professional practice".
But it cannot be normal to ignore a car belonging to the prime suspect parked outside the home of a person who had not come forward the day after her daughter's picture had been published so widely.
It is a bit rich to plead the need for forensic care in opening the boot when the vehicle has been left exposed to "contamination" by the passing traffic of a news scene for two days.
Doubtless there are many criminal investigative procedures that cannot be explained to the public without compromising their efficacy, but that fact should not be used to cover simple, inexplicable oversights. Our police normally look better than this.
It is just a pity this slow-witted piece of work should occur on a case that much of the rest of the world is watching.
