by Jerome Pinder
On November 1st 2010 days after a Police Shooting in Montagu, the Tribune had the following headlines:
- “Five quizzed over club stabbing death”
- “20-year-old man dies in hospital”
- “Spate of armed robberies over weekend”
- “Shootings leave three people in hospital”
This was followed by November 4th headlines in the Tribune as follows:
- “Violent clashes outside court”
- “PMH emergency room ‘victim of crime rise’”
- “Women shot dead, son taken to hospital”
- “Four people shot in separate incidents”
- “Shoe store ‘attacked by arsonists’”
The headlines from these two days alone give us an indication of the times in which we live and the challenges that are faced by the RBPF. And these reports from the streets do not take into consideration the broken justice system in the Bahamas, which is also a frustration for the Police.
Now let’s go back to October 28th, the day of a Police shooting in Montagu. The RBPF was conducting a normal road block when a man jumped out of a car and decided to run from the Police, armed with a gun. The Police did what they should have done and that was to respond with gun fire and take down the culprit.
What is so surprising about the news report, is that we have someone up in an office building, confirming that three or more police officers had fired multiple times, that the individual had been hit multiple times, and that things did not look promising for the individual. How could this office worker know such details of what was happening on the ground? Was he some weapons or crime scene expert to know how many times the Police had fired and how many times the man was shot?
This account was followed by a woman claiming to be fed up with the excessive violence in light of businesses and schools in the area. She questioned why the Police shot the man in the torso, instead of shooting to injure him, claiming he had nowhere to run besides the ocean. Did she consider that he may have run into one of the nearby classrooms and take children as hostages, had the Police not shot him? What excessive violence is she talking about? Clearly she must mean the above headlines and not the Police.
These accounts make you wonder what planet some people live on. Sure there are some “bad apples” in the Police force that need to be weeded out. But what about the hundreds of Police officers that put their lives on the line daily to try and maintain some law and order in this town. We all know the Government and justice system aren’t helping!
The Police had no control over this man jumping out of the car. They had no control that it happened in traffic, and in the vicinity of schools and businesses. As far as I am concerned the Police force should be ordered to ‘shoot to kill.’ We are way beyond the point of shooting to injure.
For the two individuals quoted in the Tribune’s article on the 28th October 2010, rather than spouting off on the actions of the Police, they should have been dancing in the street that the culprit had been stopped.
I am sick and tired of everybody blaming the Police every time they discharge their weapons, rather than condemning these thugs that are running rampant on our streets.
