Mickel Jackson | Why command responsibility matters

Between 1982 and 2025, four hundred and seventeen members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force were killed. Some died in the line of duty. Others were killed because they were members of the force.

The figures show clear peaks – 20 in 1984, 19 in 2007, 18 in 2010 – followed by a sustained decline into the low single digits: four in 2023, five in 2024, and four in 2025. Notwithstanding the reduction, law enforcement continues to operate in difficult conditions marked by organised gang violence and illegal high-powered weapons.

Corporal Trevoy Shaw and Constable Devoney Rose were killed during an operation in Sligoville on October 16. Rose was 19 years old. Shaw had only recently been assigned to the Special Operations Branch. A third officer was wounded.

Human rights organisations have long treated the killing of officers as a matter of concern. Jamaicans for Justice has, on multiple occasions, condemned the killing of police officers while carrying out their duties and described such acts as attacks on the rule of law. The position is not recent, and it is not selective.

When officers are killed in the line of duty, the loss and grief are real, and the obligation to mourn is not optional. Commentary that treated the deaths of Shaw and Rose as deserved should be rejected. Anger over past killings by the state, or over impunity, does not justify callous disregard for life. Those who celebrated the deaths of Shaw and Rose, or treated them as somehow deserved, committed the same moral failure as those who celebrate or dismiss the unlawful killing of civilians: they stripped a human life of its worth because of the uniform worn or the circumstances of the encounter. Both responses are corrosive.

WHEN DEATH REQUIRES INQUIRY

Some, including at the highest levels of political leadership, treat legitimate scrutiny of police operations as ambivalence towards or defence of criminality. That framing is fallacious and should be rejected. If we agree that every officer must return to their families, then an operation that ends in death requires examination of the conditions under which it was planned and led.

The Sligoville operation is now the subject of investigation. That process should establish, on the evidence available, what decisions were made before officers approached the house. This article does not pre-judge those decisions. But questions still have to be asked - and asked publicly. Who was in charge of the operation? Was the decision to proceed based on recent and specific intelligence or on more general information? Did the planning consider the possibility that civilians, including a child, might be inside the house? What risk assessment was conducted before the approach? Were alternatives to an immediate entry examined? Was an officer of inspector rank or above present and exercising effective command? Were there documented plans, and if so, did they address the presence of non-suspects?

INDECOM has already flagged the absence of senior command and the use of junior officers on planned operations as a likely contributor to rising fatalities in planned police operations. The same concern appeared in its 2014 report on command responsibility. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of people killed during planned operations increased from 11 to 76. In 2025, the country recorded 311 police fatal shootings, the highest in nearly 15 years, with planned operations accounting for roughly half of those deaths. The report noted that 97 of the fatalities in the first seven months of 2025 occurred in planned operations, some of them led by officers below the rank of inspector and some without documented plans or warrants. Whether any of those features were present in Sligoville is for the investigation to establish. What cannot be deferred is the recognition that these are recurring problems that require firm action from the High Command.

SAME QUESTIONS

The presence of a toddler and a 10-year-old girl who was shot during the exchange makes the same questions to be asked from a different standpoint. Operational choices that place both officers and civilians at risk, and that result in serious injury or death, should be examined. Better command, documented risk assessment, and the consistent use of body-worn cameras on planned operations would not eliminate danger. They would alter the conditions under which that danger is encountered and improve the quality of any subsequent review. An investigation limited to the legality of force by the independent commission will leave the prior decisions unexamined. Given the public-interest nature of the Sligoville incident, the wider operational questions must also be answered and the findings made public.

In 2010, Jamaica recorded 1,446 murders and 18 police officers were killed. In the years that followed, officer deaths fell sharply and remained in the low single digits for most of the period, even as annual murders stayed above 1,000 for much of the decade. That decline is best understood as the result of improved training and better intelligence that allowed the force to disrupt threats with less exposure of officers. It is welcome. It does not mean that every remaining death has been shown to be unavoidable or that current practices have been fully tested against the standards the force and INDECOM have identified. Reasonable questions about planning and command are not a betrayal of officers. When officers are killed in operations whose planning and command structure have not been clearly examined, the force loses both the officers and the chance to learn whether further adjustments in training, intelligence use, or supervision would have reduced the risk they faced. Armed criminals will continue to present lethal threats. Those threats shape the work. So do the requirements of accountability and the need to protect both civilians and officers. Together, these considerations should determine how operations are planned, supervised, and reviewed.

The approximately 417 officers killed over the 43-year period, including those lost in Sligoville, are among the reasons it remains necessary. Their deaths should be recorded and mourned. They should also be used to test whether current practices in intelligence, training, command, and review are sufficient to reduce the risk officers face when they confront armed criminals. The investigation now under way should answer the questions already posed. Its findings should then be used to determine what, if any, further adjustments are required so that officers executing lawful duties are placed in the strongest possible position to return home.

Mickel Jackson is the executive director of Jamaicans for Justice. Send feedback to communications@jamaicansforjustice.org.