Recently, there was a shooting of two policemen in Montego Bay, St James, during a daylight gun battle with rifle-wielding gang members. This resulted in a seriously wounded policeman sending out a voice note about the incident from his hospital bed.

The voice note contained more than just the words within its content. To me, it demonstrated something deeper. In it I heard gallantry, commitment, optimism, pain, youth, decency, and a somewhat child-like innocence.

The young policeman outlined how he had come to work, like any other day, not expecting anything special to happen. The youth, in his voice betrayed his inexperience. In this job expect to meet the devil on any given day.

The policeman spoke of hearing explosions and moving tactically towards them. The oddity of this never becomes normal. Whilst others run away from gunfire, the police must run towards it.

He spoke of realising he was injured and seeking the assistance of a member of the public. When you are injured you are simply a person who needs help. There is no civilian, no police. In a hospital bed there is just a patient.

We, at the end of the day, are all united in decency. That is what divides us as a society from the gangs. We are decent human beings at heart. They are the hunter that prey on us all.

The policeman is grateful, comforted, in fact, by the outpouring of support and the response of his colleagues to get him to hospital. Well, he will never be alone in this current crisis. He will truly appreciate what it means to be a member of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) in the hard days to come.

He is in pain during the delivery of the voice note. He is distressed that he needs surgery. I can tell he doesn’t know the half of what is coming with that surgery and the recovery that will be required when it is completed.

His youth is, perhaps, the most dominating aspect of that voice note. His simplicity obvious. It sort of brings into focus that the young men we send out to battle every day are not that much different from the ones we send to the call centres, the banks, or the civil service.

Young police are not war veterans. They are not trained or indoctrinated like army rangers, or Delta Force. They are simply young men and women who attend the JCF’s academy for a few months and get up and go to work everyday, like the tens of thousands their age.

Most of the times, if you subtract five years they would still be in school. They are just ‘people pickney’, like any other youngster you see around you. The big difference is, they are expected to run toward gunfire, whilst others get to run away.

This incident resulted in policemen being injured. So, I ask Jamaicans for Justice, how do you feel about this one?

Indecom, do you plan to include this one in your number of fatal shootings that the JCF needs to avoid? Or is this one different because two policemen were shot?

If so, then is it only when the police get shot that it is justified that they respond?

Do you see where I am going with this? If these cops weren’t shot, it would be all about the absence of their body-worn cameras. You know what really hurts me about the voice note from the cop? The man who shot him has an association — no, associations — drawn from civil society that would run to his aid if he were wounded by the police. However, the policemen who were shot have none!

They have police organisational support, but none from civil society. So our civilian populace finds the time to organise, activate, and propagate on behalf of criminals, but we can’t find anyone to do the same on behalf of the police? It’s really not a good look.

I think in many ways we have distanced ourselves from the realities of the threat faced by law enforcement personnel on a daily basis. This voice note brings it back.

In a country with a populace of 3,000,000, any group of men who can murder more than 1,000 people per year represent a group able and willing to create an extremely violent environment. This is the environment that law enforcement is expected to police every day.

Forty-five murders per 100,000 is a rate in keeping with a country at war. The police force, however, must control this country with rules befitting a peacetime designation and a society that functions like a peacetime organism.

There are no prisoners of war, no indefinite remands, no restrictions of speech or movement. You can, in fact, say any damn thing you please. You can share information with foreign powers, or even advocate on behalf of the enemy. These are characteristic of a peaceful country. Except, in this nirvana there exists a subset of society that you can call gangsters, militia, criminals — whatever designation you like.

The issue is not what they are called, but rather what environment they create. Can we realistically call this environment a peaceful one? Can we, therefore, continue to police it with rules suitable for a normal, peaceful country?

Out here in society we will always disagree on this particular subject. There will be the pacifist, the human rights advocate, the extremist, and, of course, guys like me. But in the hospital ward, where all the victims of gunshot are moaning and in pain, there lies no such diversity. They are unified in their belief that they live in a country that is engaged in a war.

Let us pray for the speedy and permanent recovery of both policemen wounded in the incident.

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