"IT REACH MI NOW" -MEANWHILE THE BODIES CONTINUE TO PILE UP By Richard Hugh Blackford
It never gets easier. For the better part of twenty years, I have followed and written about fatal shootings by Jamaica’s security forces. The names change. The communities and the grieving relatives change. But the official language is so familiar that it might have been copied and pasted from the last report: an operation, a confrontation, gunfire directed at the police, return fire, a weapon allegedly recovered, and another Jamaican pronounced dead; leaving the community to bury its dead while waiting; sometimes for years, for an investigation to say what actually happened.
This time the deceased is 35-year-old businessman and farmer Jordon Perry Smith of Seaford Town, Westmoreland who was killed at his home during an early-morning police-military operation on Friday, September 18.
COMPETING CLAIMS
A police source told The Gleaner that the security forces were greeted with gunfire and returned fire. The source said an illegal firearm was recovered. Smith’s relatives and neighbours reject that account. They say he was executed inside his home, in the presence of his wife and children. Those are competing claims which must be tested against physical evidence, ballistic evidence, witness accounts, forensic examinations and any available video instead of being decided by the uniform worn by one side or the grief expressed by the other.
On Monday, Smith’s relatives carried their grief and anger into the streets. His cousin Steve Kameka explained why: if the family remained silent, he feared Smith’s life would simply “go in vain.” He demanded that the officers involved be removed from frontline duty while the case is investigated and required to justify their use of deadly force before a court. In any circumstance, that is not an unreasonable demand. In fact, it is the very meaning of accountability.
TROUBLING QUESTIONS
The family has raised troubling questions about the processing of the scene. Relatives said investigators from the Independent Commission of Investigations, INDECOM, returned more than once to collect spent shells. Earlier reporting showed photographs of spent casings and what appeared to be an evidentiary envelope allegedly left behind after the initial examination. INDECOM must answer those concerns directly. Public confidence cannot survive on silence, especially when the evidence may determine whether this was a lawful use of force or an unlawful killing.
Smith’s cousin Claudia Bell described children struggling with the trauma of seeing their father killed. His grandmother, Evelyn Salmon, described a grandson who farmed, operated a water truck, built his home and remained rooted in his community. Relatives asked why neither their member of parliament nor other political representatives appeared during their hour of distress.
That question reaches beyond Seaford Town: when politicians ask communities for votes, do those communities receive representation only during an election campaign?
JAMAICA HAS CREATED A MORAL CRISIS
The most revealing words came from Kameka: “I used to say, ‘Good job, Officers.’ Now you see where me deh? Now I feel it… And now I realize police is executing whole heap of innocent people. It cyaan be that a pure badman in Jamaica?”
Those words capture the moral crisis Jamaica has created as for years, many Jamaicans cheered fatal police shootings, particularly when the deceased was labelled a gunman, a gang member or a person of interest. Too many accepted the label as evidence, the police account as verdict and death as punishment. Due process was treated as an inconvenience, and those who asked questions were condemned as offering sympathy for criminals.
But a society cannot surrender due process for people it dislikes and expect to recover it when the police arrive at the door of someone it loves. Today it is another family’s son. Tomorrow it may be yours.
OUR POLITICAL PRACTICES CULTIVATED THIS PROBLEM
I do not approach this subject from a place of innocence about Jamaican violence. I grew up around Jarrett Lane, Wareika Hill, McGregor’s Gully and Mountain View during the 1960s and 1970s. I saw violence at close quarters. I understand the fear that violent criminals impose on communities and the danger police officers face when confronting armed men.
I also know that our politics helped to prepare the soil in which Jamaica’s culture of violence flourished. Political tribalism, garrisonization, firearms, patronage and partisan protection created monsters that the State later claimed it could control only through more violence. And so for decades, the principal response has been to pour police violence onto social violence. That is not a crime-control strategy. It is an admission that the State has failed to build the investigative capacity, intelligence systems, witness protection, prosecutorial strength and public trust required to arrest suspects and prove cases in court.
THE ARITHMETIC OF A NATIONAL EMERGENCY
The official figures should shock the conscience. INDECOM reported that 215 people had been fatally shot by members of the security forces by September 14, 2026. Sixty-seven of those deaths occurred in just 26 multiple-fatality incidents: 13 double killings, 11 triple killings and two incidents in which four people were killed. Those 67 deaths had already exceeded the 62 people killed in multiple-fatality incidents during all of 2025.
INDECOM also reported that 17 people were killed during the first fourteen days of September alone; raising concern about the repeated absence of body-worn cameras in high-risk operations, including operations involving unmarked vehicles and the apprehension of persons believed to possess firearms.
Published media totals for September 16 differ, as some reported 217 and another report stated 219. What is beyond dispute is that additional fatal shootings followed, including Smith’s death and the fatal shooting of Amani Malcolm in Kingston on September 18. The precise running total should be updated publicly by INDECOM, but the wider reality is already clear: when the 2026 deaths are added to the 311 recorded in 2025, the number killed by state agents since January 1, 2025, has moved beyond 526 and continued rising toward—or past—530. That number does not by itself prove that every shooting was unlawful. INDECOM properly warns that every incident must be judged on its own evidence and against the legal tests of necessity and proportionality. Police officers do encounter armed resistance, and they have the right to defend themselves and others against an imminent threat. But neither does the repeated police claim of “confrontation” prove that every killing was lawful. That is precisely why Jamaica needs independent investigations, preserved evidence, body-camera recordings, transparent reports and courts.
THE RECKONING AT THE DOORSTEP
For years, the cheers were deafening whenever police killed another person described as a criminal. The comfortable assumption was that only “bad men” had anything to fear.
Now the State’s approach is colliding with families, communities and consciences that once looked the other way. Steve Kameka’s words should haunt the nation: “I used to say, ‘Good job, Officer.’ … Now I feel it.” That is how public trust collapses. Not all at once, but one disputed death, one missing body-camera recording, one mishandled crime scene and one unanswered family at a time.
Jamaica must change course before grief hardens into violent retaliation. The answer is not hostility toward every police officer. The answer is lawful, professional policing: better investigations, better intelligence, mandatory cameras, independent oversight, timely prosecutions and an unambiguous commitment to arrest wherever arrest is reasonably possible.
No officer should be asked to die rather than protect himself. But no citizen should be marked for death because the State finds prosecution too difficult. The family of Jordon Perry Smith is asking for evidence, accountability and justice. Jamaica should demand the same; not because we have already decided exactly what happened inside that house, but because no government and no police force should be permitted to decide that its own account is the final word.
Meanwhile, the bodies continue to pile up. And if Jamaica remains silent, the silence will become part of the killing.
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