The night of August 11, 2024 is one that is burned in my mind forever. It was the night that the lives of 18 people and their families were directly altered by the actions of a few evil cowards with illegal guns.

This was the night of the Cherry Tree Lane massacre.

I recall hearing the news and, although it was out of my police jurisdiction, deciding to go to the scene to see how I could help. Whilst dressing I received a call from my crime chief Homer Morgan, who simply said: “Pick me up on the way.”

Minutes after arriving at the scene, I realised that most major crime fighters were there — from the highest to the lowest ranks. Some had left before I had got there, as they had heard of the incident a bit earlier.

I recall going through the list of victims and realising that the age and victimology assessment indicated that those targeted weren’t gang members. Some animals had turned AK-47 rifles on innocent people — people totally uninvolved in their world.

The injured one-year-old and the dead seven-year-old child hit me the hardest. I would have, at that point, accepted any means or measures that my Government could have offered to ensure that I never have to see a dead seven-year-old on a murder list, a one-year-old with a rifle wound, or 18 lives shattered by an AK in the hands of an animal ever again.

I guess this is what sets me apart from the membership and leadership of Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ). They would rather see these atrocities again, than allow for a government to exercise powers that could result in a dictatorship. I really am way past that. Frankly, at this point, I don’t give a damn. I just want the killing to stop.

To be fair to JFJ, they probably see a solution in the short term other than the Bukele model. I don’t, so there we disagree. If they believe that there is an alternative solution in the short term that can instantly shut down the gangs, other than subjecting them to indefinite detention, then they are ignorant of the facts.

I am an expert. I have spent decades with a rifle in my hand fighting these gangs and I am telling them that only indefinite detention can shut the gangs down immediately. It was, after all, the removal of indefinite detention that caused this whole crisis to mushroom into the tragedy it now is. Look at where our crime was before the repealing of the Suppression of Crime Act in 1993. Look at where our homicide rate is now. Even if you want to adjust for population size, it was 25 per 100,000 in 1992 versus 49 per 100,000 now and in 2009 it went up to 55 per 100,000.

Maybe the issue is that I trust the heads of our political parties not to become tyrants with this law and JFJ doesn’t. I can’t blame them based on our history, but Andrew Holness and Mark Golding are not Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. Holness and Golding are far more responsible and unselfish than the 70s politicians.

Maybe JFJ can’t fathom the structure that this detention model would take. They think it would be a decision that could be taken by any police officer to remand any citizen. That’s not my plan. The power would rest with the Commissioner of Police Dr Kevin Blake, and I trust him implicitly. They should also.

I was a guest on the radio talk show Beyond the Headlines recently. The executive director of JFJ Mickel Jackson was also on the programme. We both had our points of view. We were respectful of each other and the moderator. We are capable of disagreeing and still having respect for each other and the public.

Gangs are not like this. Every dispute results in violence. They kill like drugged child soldiers who disconnect from the normal morals and values of society. We confuse our logic and values with gangsters. They have virtually no value system and respect no one. Never confuse the fear they have of dons with respect.

What is fuelling their penchant for killing is the lack of consequences for their actions. If we don’t find a solution for the lack of consequence for killing it will never stop. This is not going to improve due to better police investigations. There is nothing wrong with the ones we are conducting now. The issue with murder is that it requires a great deal of evidence to prosecute. Killing, especially our type, doesn’t leave a lot of evidence that we can logically use.

Additionally, there is the witness issue. Witnesses can’t give evidence because gangs occupy the ghettos all the time. They live there. They control the ground after the police and army leave and we don’t have enough troops to occupy every ghetto and we never will.

New York doesn’t either, for that matter. Countries and their armed forces aren’t designed to occupy all parts of their high-crime zones with boots on the ground. So love, like, or dislike it, only the power to detain indefinitely on intelligence can force the gangs to halt the killing in the short run because only that brings an immediate consequence.

I can literally tell you who commits more than 80 per cent of the murders in my police division but still we can solve only 60 per cent, and my division has the highest clear-up rate of all the high-crime zones annually. The detectives are incredible. We wouldn’t make the mistakes President Bukele has made. We would learn from them. We wouldn’t have arrest quotas. We wouldn’t even mass arrest. We would just go for the gangsters as intelligence directs us that they have offended.

If they stop killing then we likely wouldn’t go for them, unless they were wanted previously. The idea is to prevent murders, not arrest two per cent of our population. This could work. This can work. It’s no longer a theory; it’s been tested. There’s no longer a question of whether or not it’s possible; we have seen the impact in El Salvador.

The question is: do we value the lives of our citizens more than the rights of the men who kill them?

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