It was about 4:30 p.m. last Wednesday and I was driving by National Heroes Park, heading towards Cross Roads. I was engaged in a lively but largely forgettable conversation with my two female passengers.

About 20 metres ahead, I saw a large crowd gathered in the vicinity of Prince of Wales Street. As I got closer to the chaotic scene, I heard loud shrieks and calls for help. A portly woman, with tears streaming down her face, frantically stopped a car. "Duh sah," she says. "Dem jus shoot mi bredda".

With the assistance of other women she pleaded with the driver to assist in taking her sibling to the hospital. I slowed my car to get a better sense of what was happening but my passengers insisted I should not tarry. I comply.

I later learnt that seven people were shot in that area in a drive-by shooting - two of them fatally. A carnival of misery was left behind.

Great distress

The whole business that day brought great distress over my female companions. Like so many Jamaicans, they were struggling to find an answer to this wanton criminality and violence that has blanketed the country. Their distress quickly turned to panic. One of them suggested the police needs to shoot first and ask questions after. To her mind, "you have to fight fire with fire".

So, how would we protect the basic liberties of people under the shoot-first policy, I asked my friend. Her response was simple. Some innocent people will have to suffer, if we are to get the problem under control.

It's understandable that people should feel this way. There is a genuine search for a solution. Even so, we should beware of pushing the panic button. If we lose our heads and support the most draconian measures, out of fear and despondency, then we could be plunging the country into an even deeper pit than we now occupy. As bad as things are, they can always get worse.

I've been re-reading the 1993 Wolfe report on crime and it points out that some of the problems affecting the inability of the security forces to deal adequately with the immediate crime situation resulted from the Suppression of Crime Act and the avenues it supplied for the abuse of people's rights by the police.

"The police, who was once seen as a friend and protector of the citizenry, is now perceived as an agent of oppression and an enemy," the report said.

Bad legislation

Even though the Act has been repealed the effects still linger. Looking through the lens of history, we can see clearly that this was bad legislation, crafted in panicky reaction to a spike in crime during the 1970s. We dare not repeat that error or make a similar one.

Don Robotham has suggested a system of preventive detention which would see the rounding up of "criminals" for as much as 90 days, without charge, as one measure to get atop the crime problem. This is an example of the kind of thinking we must seek to avoid for it is partly responsible for getting us here in the first place.

State terrorism

Such measures are prone to abuse and are likely to create enmity between members of the security forces and those communities, which already see themselves as victims of state terrorism.

The government is to unveil its crime strategy this week. Let's hope it is a strategy that is informed, not by fear and panic, but by intelligence and a fundamental respect for the rights of all Jamaicans. If we throw out basic rights in the quest to solve crime, I don't know if this country will be worth living in, anyway.