Some years ago I was on duty in my police division in a place called Central Village. It was about 7:00 pm. I saw a gathering of people in a yard where they have a shop that sells alcohol and snacks. There is also an abandoned house at the rear of the premises.

I was with my team, so we entered the yard to buy some sodas. I have worked in that community over 20 years, I know some people by name, most people by alias, and virtually everybody by sight.

I had seen many of those people in that yard earlier as they were watching cricket on television and I had to stop by during my duty to check on the score. I had joked with some of them that maybe a miracle could occur and West Indies could win. As we entered the property it was dark, and a much younger colleague was beside me. I called him young Smith. He currently serves the US Army as the world continues to steal our talent. The rest of the team were perhaps 15 feet behind.

As I became visible to the gathering in the yard, I saw a man run. I knew this was not a good thing. Innocent people don’t run on the approach of the police. As my younger colleague and I began chasing him, he fired behind him and ran beside the left side of the house and to the rear of the premises. As we attempted to follow him, he fired again. We tried to head him off by running across the front of the house to reach the right side.

The house was abandoned, so you could see the back window space from the front window space as there were no windows in them. As we were running across the front of the house, he fired from the back window through the front window, impeding our efforts to reach the right side of the house to corner him.

He fired through each window as he made his way to the right side of the house. This, needless to say, slowed us down. By the time he got to the right side of the house he fired from back to front again, impeding our efforts to apprehend him. We were, of course, returning fire, but his constant suppressive fire made our efforts somewhat limited. So he escaped.

Miraculously, nobody at the gathering nor any of the police party was hurt. This was not necessarily a significant moment in my police life. It was one more shooting on one more Saturday night.

What happened after, although not unusual, I found upsetting. The entire gathering began to spew abuse at us with special effort aimed at me because I have been there so long so I am the one they know. They were just beside themselves with fury, accusing me of shooting up their party, the same people who just a few hours before were laughing with me at the West Indies cricket team.

I can manage verbal abuse, talk all you want, just don’t touch me because I’m going to defend myself. But this abuse was so unjustified. This young man, with no provocation, had just fired at my colleagues and I in an effort to escape possible apprehension, and loss of his firearm. He had fired over 15 rounds endangering the lives of everybody at that gathering. I knew him well. If I had seen him at the gathering that night prior to him shooting at me, I would certainly have searched him.

His luck ran out some months later when he fired at another police party and lost his life. This man was a habitual criminal, a parasite in the community. My colleagues and I were in that community because we were preventing gangs from killing each other and innocent residents. How the hell did we become the enemy? The only thing we were guilty of was planning to drink sugar that our diet can’t accommodate.

There was no hostility with any of the people at that gathering. One of their criminals almost took the life of my young colleague and myself and they are cursing me. My young colleague at that time had a baby just days old. He could’ve lost his life if that creep had a better aim. Myself had a family that I wanted to go home to. Why, therefore, is shooting at us OK, but us shooting back worthy of us being abused?

As I simmered and quietly braved the verbal abuse I saw the start of another dimension. Indecom turns up. The investigators, who I know well, come on the scene. They are not my enemies. One of them was a police officer who had retired. If I see them under normal conditions I will greet them and possibly tease them that they are working for a foreign Government.

The upset gathering immediately began to tell them “bare lies”. They start doing their investigation. To me they look too enthusiastic. So I am pondering. These people who I have no problem with whatsoever are telling lies on me to people who I have no issues with either and they are looking like they believe that a man my age and experience, with no mental illnesses, entered a relatively crowded venue and opened fire on a crowd.

So, again, I ask myself, “What made us the enemy?”

The citizens we have been trying to protect all day, each of us lugging around 30 pounds of gear, walking between zinc fences in the hot sun till nightfall, the same citizens that, like us, were secretly hoping that the West Indies cricket team could actually win a Test, have, in a moment, become our enemy.

The agents of the State who have arrived, who on any given day would share a laugh with me, are eagerly taking reports from people hoping to get enough evidence to put my young colleague and I in a cage with inadequate air, a bucket in place of a toilet, no light to read, no bed to sleep on, and surrounded by men who will kill us as we sleep.

When did we become the enemy?

Thirty minutes earlier we were there to defend poor people who are unable to defend themselves. Now they are trying to destroy us. Although I have isolated this incident, this is the reality of every police officer who puts their life, their liberty, and their children’s future on the line to police garrison communities.

Once something happens we are treated like the enemy. It doesn’t matter what the facts are. The investigators from Indecom who show up, who are one of the most competent group of investigators this country has ever produced, are there to investigate the shooting and will treat the garrison citizens’ vitriol as evidence. Those statements can result in police officers’ lives being destroyed.

Luckily, because they are really good investigators and most of the times they realise that the angry citizens’ account of what happened does not match the physical evidence, nothing comes of it.

So that talent, which can produce the quality investigations that I see them conducting, is being wasted investigating my colleagues and I because we are not the enemy. The enemy is the gangs.

Indecom investigators would serve this country far greater if they were investigating criminals instead of police. That talent, that competence, is needed to augment our overworked investigators. Many have dozens of murder cases investigating at any point in time.

The gangs are the enemies of this country — the poor and rich alike. They have the potential to turn Jamaica into Haiti. They are the reason that we have been poor since Independence. They hijacked the 70s when we would have grown and developed into the pearl of the Caribbean.

Every voice, every resource, every effort needs to be focused on their destruction because they are the enemy.

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