Kristen Gyles | Policing: no walk through the meadows

By now, many of us have seen the viral 18-minute video of the recent armed conflict between the police and occupiers of a house off the Sligoville main road. The police had reportedly traced a high-risk, wanted man to the house, but were forced into a stand-off when one or more armed men barricaded themselves inside the house with others, including a woman and children.

The report from the police is that, at some point during the stand-off, the men inside the house indicated they wanted to surrender and held one of the children out the door. When police officers came to retrieve the child, they were shot at and killed.

The slain officers are Corporal Trevoy Shaw and Constable Devoney Rose.

Reports from INDECOM indicate that a total of 10 persons were shot, of which five are now dead, including the two officers. The three other deceased individuals are men who were inside the house. A 10-year-old girl was also critically injured.

The report from the police is not incompatible with what can be seen from the viral video. In the video, the officers are heard interacting with two men who were inside, who repeatedly said they were unarmed, that they wanted to get out of the house and that they were not the ones firing. Since dead men tell no tales, we cannot be sure whether the men who spoke were both, indeed, unarmed. What is clear is that there was in fact at least one armed man inside the house firing shots. In the video, a man can actually be seen sitting with a gun in hand. What is also clear from the video is that these men were not strangers to each other. In fact, we now know that the three men who were fatally shot are relatives.

Since the incident, it was reported that the high-risk target actually evaded police and is now on the run. We don’t know a whole lot about the deceased men. We also don’t know exactly what happened either before or after the 18 minutes that were recorded.

Having watched the recording several times, one thing is hard to ignore. The officers who stood outside the house interacting with the men inside were professional, composed and spoke with compassion. For several minutes, they reasoned with the men inside the house, who kept insisting they were unarmed. The officers repeatedly told them to get out of the house and appeared to be giving them time to do so.

This unfortunate incident should remind us of the fact that the work of a police officer is no walk through the meadows. Before we hastily criticise the officers for what they did or didn’t do, we should think about the exigency of a situation in which one is literally being shot at, is attempting to shoot the individuals firing shots, and is simultaneously trying to avoid shooting a child who is said to be “at the door” of the house that shots are being fired from. That is a hard situation for anyone to be in, even a trained police officer. Sometimes we forget that police officers are real people. Regardless of training, they will experience fear, anxiety, nervousness, pity, sadness, anger, relief and happiness, just like the rest of us do.

The occupiers of the house in Sligoville knew this. This may be why they kept repeating that “the baby deh a di door”. They knew that the policemen would not want to shoot at a child and so it would appear the child was used as leverage to dissuade the police from firing into the house.

At a point in the recording, a police officer is heard telling the men that, if they care about the ‘baby’ they should send her out of the house. The response from one of the men was “mi care bout myself too”. And that response is telling. Releasing the child did not appear to be the priority of those men.

We simply don’t have enough information to attest to the innocence of the deceased men who were shot and killed. They may very well have been hostages themselves, as they seemed to claim in the video. And maybe they were gunmen.

That is what makes good and honest policing so difficult. Police officers are forced to make hard, split-second judgement calls each and every time they go out on special operations. The decisions are tough precisely because they don’t want to harm the innocent. Jamaican hard-hearted criminals, on the other hand, do not care about life. They will shoot or otherwise endanger the innocent, even their own 10-year-old daughters.

The other obvious takeaway from this heartbreaking incident is that we have all been relying on a screen recording of a video call between one of the deceased men and an unidentified acquaintance. The video does not show much, but a lot can be heard. While the video speaks well of the conduct of the police officers, it is sad that, yet again, we are without footage from police body-worn cameras (BWCs) and are therefore reliant on the footage generated by one of the alleged criminals.

For the umpteenth time, and for whatever it is worth, BWC footage only helps to provide answers to the many questions that arise in situations like this one. The use of BWCs would likely instil trust and confidence that police officers act with integrity and report honestly on their interactions with civilians. So, why are BWCs not treated as a necessity for special operations? Fortunately, the record, regardless of its source, suggests that officers Shaw and Rose acted bravely, compassionately, and in good faith. Condolences to their family members and loved ones!

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com