TODAY'S EXTRACT IS FROM THE EDITORIAL PUBLISHED A YEAR AGO, OCTOBER 27, 2003LESS 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 front-line duty of the crime chief for St. James, Deputy Superintendent Derrick 'Cowboy' Knight...
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...
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.
