LESS THAN a fortnight after earning commendation for their handling of the Canterbury confrontation in Montego Bay the police have provoked citizen wrath and face investigation over last Saturday's debacle in Flankers.
Police commanders themselves concede that the two elderly citizens shot dead were decent law-abiding persons; thus warranting the removal from frontline duty of the crime chief for St. James, Deputy Superintendent Derrick 'Cowboy' Knight.
Acting Head of Government Portia Simpson Miller, in the absence of the Prime Minister abroad, has herself ordered immediate investigation by the independent Public Police Complaints Authority and the Bureau of Special Investigation.
Unlike the Canterbury episode when tourist traffic was largely isolated from that violence this time scores of visitors and other travellers were stranded when long stretches of roadway leading to the Sangster International Airport were blocked with rocks and burning debris. The main shopping centres of the Second City became a virtual ghost town.
With the roads leading from some of the major hotels east of the airport blocked throughout the day, tour buses were allowed to use the airstrip to take departing passengers. In one instance a hotel used a boat sailing along the coastline.
The impact on tourism will obviously be negative and the relevant agencies face a difficult task repairing the image of a resort so susceptible to violence. Already the international media have been reporting "thousands rioting in Jamaica".
Canterbury showed up the extent to which criminal gangs had penetrated outside the capital city and conurbation. But the professionalism of the police in that case was generally commended. Flankers, with its own history of volatility, may have been an extension of what the police sought to achieve in tackling the gangs that have fled westward. But the mistakes made this time have been costly with innocent lives lost and community anger inflamed.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
