There are many parts of our history that we choose to forget, report falsely, and/or pretend it happened differently.

I often speak and write about the civil war between 1974 and 1980 that appears nowhere in our history books which people call “the era of political violence”. I guess that sounds better than “civil war’. Then there is the Morant Bay Rebellion that we have sold as a popular peasant rebellion in which the poor rose up against oppression. We, of course, have failed to mention that the group that put down the rebellion, the Maroons, was celebrated in Kingston and Clarendon with parades. I wonder how popular this rebellion really was.

Well let me bring you to a point in our history when we barely missed becoming Venezuela or Haiti, and the only reason that we were saved was because of a strong barrister with an incredibly broad back named Paula Llewellyn.

In 2011, the Independent Commission of Investigations (Indecom) began functioning in Jamaica. However, it really didn’t begin to do damage until 2012. That was when its quest to charge police officers without going through the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) grew feet. This may not seem like a big deal to a lay person who doesn’t live in the world of a crime fighter. But what it meant to those of us who actually fight gangs for a living was that an organisation which was really formed because of the influence of criminal rights organisations and was able to accept money from local and international bodies — that were considered, in effect, enemies of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) — would be able to charge police officers without the file first being verified by the ODPP.

This may not make sense to those outside of the JCF, but that was how we looked at it. Police officers reacted the same way they did when Colonel Trevor MacMillan became commissioner of police and declared war on “name brand” police officers — it was simply a repeat of that drama.

Police officers no longer wanted to be known as lawmen who engaged gunmen in combat often. The rhetoric of Indecom expressed this sentiment and the message became an epidemic. The gangs smelt blood and the killings began. In fact, between 2011 and 2017 murders increased by 63 per cent, culminating in the second-highest homicide total in our history in 2017.

This was the tip of the iceberg. Who prevented it from becoming a version of Haiti and Venezuela — where gangs function as militias — is a lady called Paula Llewellyn.

She was the director of public prosecutions (DPP) and opposed this practice by Indecom, thus resulting in the prevention of an entire stand down of the front line of Jamaica’s armed forces.

I heard it, I observed it, I lived it.

Police officers threatening to avoid combat, police officers taking cover rather than firing back, all believing that an arm of their Government was trying to charge them with a crime in order to achieve statistical targets to please overseas and local lobby groups. Whether the officers were right or wrong, they believed it.

DPP Llewellyn did not believe that the Indecom Act gave Indecom the amount of power it seemed to believe it had. This issue was so contentious that it was the Privy Council which delivered the final ruling.

I don’t want you to only look at the level that murder rate could have reached; I can tell you, if DPP Llewellyn didn’t oppose Indecom on this issue, it would have been 1,000 more. What I want to bring to the fore is what Jamaica could have become post-2017 had she not stood up.

Let us just suppose that she was not as strong as she is and allowed Indecom to charge police officers like common criminals without the oversight of the only body in the country that can determine prosecutions. Can you imagine how much more worse the police reaction would have been? Can you also imagine what the murder rate would have been seven years after 2017? If it increased by 63 per cent with DPP Llewellyn preventing Indecom from charging police officers without her office’s oversight, think on the impact in that seven-year period had the Privy Council not rubbished that practice.

Picture a Jamaica with roadblocks manned by militias with AK47 rifles. I have seen this often in the Middle East, on television.

Do you realise how easy it would have been for her to take a weaker position? I can think of so many public servants who wouldn’t take on this challenge. In fact, it can be said that it is the culture within government organisations not to take on sister organisations, which, quite frankly, is why so many bad things have occurred in our history.

This is one of the battles that your children will not read about in history books, but I can tell you, this was one of the darkest periods of our history and could have been our complete undoing if DPP Llewellyn were not as vociferously opposed to Indecom’s assertions and as committed to her country.

There have been dark periods of world history when tragedies occur because public servants did not take a stand. It is a well-known fact that the final nail in the coffin of European Jews was the result of a meeting at which cowardly men failed to stand up to autocratic generals who laid out plans for the mass extermination of the Jews. These weren’t soldiers who failed to stand up, these were technocrats, lawyers, and other categories of public servants who rolled over and allowed mass murder and the eventual capitulation of the German Government.

You may not understand this comparison because you don’t live my life. You also don’t understand how much of a threat the gangs of this country represent to our nation. All they need is a police force that is not motivated or scared out of its wits because of the actions of its own Government. All they need are public servants who sit by and allow reckless behaviour to be perpetuated to achieve the myopic ambitions of a few empowered officials.

We are saying goodbye to DPP Llewellyn, and I imagine most won’t realise the many battles she fought for this country. I am positive history won’t even record how she saved this country from total and complete destruction.

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Jason McKay