Following the recent shooting death of Vanessa Kirkland in Greenwich Farm by police, the Jamaica Constabulary received another body blow this week with the news that an autopsy report on 45-year-old Dianne Gordon in Cassava Piece revealed that she was shot by a weapon that was less than 20 inches away when the fatal bullet was fired. In other words, she was shot at point-blank range.

This news is a bombshell for the police who had previously reported that Gordon was shot dead during a crossfire between the security forces and gunmen in mid-March. People have suspected for years that many of the police reports issued by police via the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) were for the most part contrived and with good cause. Reading the CCN reports is sometimes like hearing a scratched record: "Police noticed a group of persons acting suspiciously and on seeing the police, they opened fire and ran. The fire was returned and one man was found suffering from gunshot wounds in nearby bushes and was pronounced dead at hospital. The others escaped on foot or in a motor car."

At first glance, one wonders if gunmen strategically position themselves near bushes because so many shoot-outs occur near them. The other thing is that any suspect police shoot, it seems, will always be pronounced dead at hospital because as we heard from witnesses in the Vanessa Kirkland case, the police who shoot you are not necessarily in a hurry to take the gunshot victim to hospital. In the case of 'crossfire' shootings like in Gordon's case, it's kind of hard to envision her not being the intended target when she was only 20 inches away. Either that or she just jumped into the path of the spray of bullets just as the trigger was pulled. Something is fundamentally wrong and someone needs to start making people accountable for this mess because these killings are terrifyingly out of hand.

What is even more terrifying to me is that on Tuesday this week, Jamaicans for Justice and the Jamaica Civil Society Coalition mounted a protest against the recent spate of police killings in front the Ministry of National Security on Oxford Road and except for a handful of people, very few outside those organisations turned up. The way I see it, there should have been a sea of people out there.

These are the things that we should be angry about, the things that we should be demanding justice for. It amazes me that several Jamaicans, innocent Jamaicans, were gunned down by the police, at least it seems that way, and we remain mute on the issue. This, in a country where we block the roads for any and everything but when it comes to the wasting of human life we just go about our business as if all was well with the world. What the hell is wrong with us?

We get very vocal about gay people. We block roads over high light bills, bad roads, no water and all that, but police kill a woman one week and a high school girl the next and we are cool with that. Yes, the people of Greenwich Farm protested down in Greenwich Farm but what is needed is an island-wide protest to send a strong message that the actions of the police in the aforementioned situations are unacceptable and someone must be held accountable.

Maybe we didn't protest because Mama P is in power now, or God knows whatever other ridiculous reason there is. Here is the thing though: how many more people do the police have to kill under highly questionable circumstances before we really get mad enough to march to demand change?

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Reading the CCN reports is sometimes like hearing a scratched record