Whose rights is more important that of the police or the criminal?

They say safety is just a superstition. You can never be too careful in this environment because your life is invariably affected by the people around you and that you come in contact with.

Have you ever thought about if you could turn back the hands of time when someone you hold there are lost to you forever. Would you have handled things differently?

My cousin was murdered by the police recently and I am numb from crying and regurgitating, rehashing what I should have done about my cousins life. Maybe if I had tried to influence him more. Infiltrate myself into his life then maybe he would still be alive but I understand that it does not work like that. He never really wanted my advice. I have conceded that i did try to reach out to him and I felt as if I was encroaching on his personal space.

I feel as if I watched him slip down a slippery slope, always saying that I was afraid of the lifestyle and pathos that he was now embracing. Always saying yet reluctantly expressing that I believe that this kind of lifestyle would lead to his demise. I was not worried because it does not always happen like that. I only wanted to scare him with the vehemence with which I often caution him about that bad boy friend that he kept.


Now I feel terrible. I see his potential and his life looks as if it was a waste.
Some people even say that he threw away his life. He made himself a liability by allying with alleged bad man. I am still incredulous about his death. I did not see him therefore it looks like a dream, a fallacy, a story or maybe a nightmare.

He is a lesson to our young men that badness does not pay. It also serves as a reminder to our children that money does not always guarantee protections. Money does not buy you clout or immunity from the police officers. Do not think that because you are rich that you automatically are excluded from being treated crappy by the police officers. Police officers already knew that Foote was a likkle ghetto bwoy who ran into some money and did not have a really big background to fight them.

People saying nothing will come out of his death because they want to believe that his killing was justified or maybe because they have seen this happen too many times to believe that any justice will come from acts of police excesses and brutality.

I keep thinking about the hypocrisy which is the moral fabric of our nation. Police tell you to inform on gun man and you become afraid because gun men will come and kill you. You inform on the police and you can end up dead because police can always claim that they were in a shoot-out and found you suffering from gunshot wounds. And how you died later at hospital.

I realise that i have to be aggressive in my "Jamaica Youth Empowerment Network" in teaching my children about the degenerative values that we embrace as a society. I shook my head in despair and disillusion when i read the news and listen the blatant lie that the police officers told about what happened. Their fabricated story of a shoot out that we the residents knew never took place.

I wondered whose rights supersedes whom?

The rights of the residents or the rights of the police to protect the faux notions that they put out to the media. Whose rights supersedes whom? The rights of the parents of this gentleman or the rights of the police officers to protect the social image and credibility of their abominable institution? The individual rights of people to be protected by the laws of a nation or the right for police officers to tweak the law to serve their own ulterior, selfish motives? The right for every human being to be given a second chance and not be gunned down like an animal, crying out for help in their own home.

I know that my cousin was no saint but he did not deserve to die. People commit far more atrocious acts than him, reprehensible deeds and no one gave them seven gun shots. Apparently the ministry of security have money to buy shots why these police officers keep wasting their ammunitions on innocent young men.