MANY years ago a police officer was killed in a shoot-out.

I will not speak to his identity or location as this is a story with sad, problematic issues surrounding it.

I didn’t know him very well but he was an enthusiastic officer who would often join us on operations, even though he worked in a separate section. He was a traffic cop.

I wasn’t there the day he was killed and often wonder if I had been, could I have prevented it.

Firstly, he wasn’t a trained entry specialist and he didn’t even wear a bulletproof vest. He was issued one, but in his area of expertise he hardly wore them back then.

Wearing them is in itself training, believe it or not. You have to learn how to manage the extra layers of auxiliary to your body; you have to get used to the weight and the mass. I frankly don’t like them but acknowledge how necessary they are.

Secondly, he was not part of a team, and high-risk entry is a team activity, so on just those two grounds he wouldn’t have been there had I, or the team I served, been present. He wouldn’t have been included.

Sadly, as mentioned before, he was killed, and at his funeral I saw his family, in particular his daughter, beside themselves with grief. You could see that they were a unit, albeit destroyed.

Many years passed and I didn’t see his family until one day whilst investigating a killer I wanted to take off the street. I heard he was attempting to molest a minor in the community where he ruled and I was looking into the allegation.

To my horror I realised that the almost victim of the paedophile was the daughter of my slain colleague.

I went to their home to further my probe and saw the once-proud woman a beaten version of herself, the son a thug, and the daughter just seemed to have given up on life.

It was a horrible reminder that when these young family men go on operations, to put their lives on the line, that it is not just their lives, well-being, and future they are putting on the line, but their family’s as well.

It is often the existence of a male figure in a home that makes the difference between a young male becoming a functional member of society versus a thug, and a young lady being protected vs a victim.

This story also sends another message, that this cop shouldn’t have been there.

I will expand on this point later in the article.

A little known fact is that Jamaica went through a period where kidnapping became a very real threat and there was fear we could become Mexico or Trinidad and Tobago in this respect.

It was fought by a few of Jamaica’s top sleuths, most notably Superintendent Mevral Smith.

Almost every one of the cases were solved, hence the decline in that horrible industry.

Well, in that era I would often play my part as the man who delivered ransoms. I am a hostage and crisis negotiator and I am a trained SWAT operator, so I sort of fit the bill back then as suitable for the task.

One night I was called to deliver a ransom and was unfortunately hours away at the other end of the island. The circumstances did not allow for delays so they sent a detective in my place.

He bravely accepted the task, but unfortunately, was killed during the exchange.

Although I understand that the situation did not allow for the selection of the most suited, I have always felt that he shouldn’t have been there. Not that he did anything wrong; I just feel that based on my experience and a few others in that field we maybe could have picked up where this was going earlier and that may have changed the outcome.

Now, back to the point relevant to both stories, these officers in our present environment would never be carrying out those functions in that field. This is because the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) is more of a specialist-geared organisation than it was when that traffic officer was killed.

So, traffic officers become experts in their field, detectives in theirs, crime scene guys in theirs and, of course, operators, to include special operators, become experts in their own field of high-risk entry, hostile incursions, and working in small teams in violent environments.

This is necessary. I can ride a motorcycle, however I can’t ride those traffic bikes the way traffic cops do. I don’t have the experience to do high-speed chases on a bike — I will get myself killed. However, if I do it for a few years everyday I will get better, good even.

The same goes for intel operators and investigators. I’m okay, but I am not Homer Morgan or Wayne Hunt. They are specialists in their field of investigations. I’m an expert at high-risk entry.

So the traffic cop is going to write more tickets than me and likely engage in hand-to-hand combat against more taxi men than I do. The aforementioned investigators will spend more time as investigators in High Court cases. High-risk entry experts will likely have more reason to interact with gunmen in a combat environment than they will.

It’s caused specialisation and it saves police officers lives — both from non-operators getting shot, and from non-expert riders ending up under a truck wheel. It also ensures less innocent persons are hurt by accident. This is very important.

Understanding the roles of the men and women who serve you is important. Why? Because if you don’t it’s hard to appreciate the risk to the officer and his family when an operator performs 1,000 high-risk entries per year and is then targeted by the gang and the human rights community.

We are a country that could easily slip into a Mexican or Haitian scenario.

Gangs are no longer fearing the police in these countries. Law enforcement has lost control and these countries are literally tilting towards the point of one return, that being extremism.

If they don’t get their act together soon they will have to morph into a Philippian solution — that being the mass murder of the criminals.

We don’t want to ever reach that point where militias are just slaughtering who they decide are criminals.

In order to not head where the abovementioned are we must try to understand the roles and functions of our protectors so that we are more able to support them.

It’s important to have a good grip on where we are and where we could go. This knowledge makes it harder for the evil, manipulative, and naive among us to influence us against our own for their selfish or even stupid motives.

Understanding your officers, operators and the hell they and their families live in is key to making decisions on almost every level.

There is no bliss in ignorance!

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