WHEN I started serving the St Catherine South police division over two decades ago I noticed that all delivery units to stores and bars in Central Village did their distributions on Mandela Highway, in the morning, on the strip of land that divides it.

I enquired about it and was told that it was because the drivers feared their trucks and delivery units being robbed by gangsters who “run the place”. I was taken aback. I thought, how the hell could a bunch of hoodlums “run” any place to the point where trucks and delivery vehicles could not make deliveries to commercial entities in the community?

I was going to change that, or so I thought. It didn’t take me long to realise that it was true — they did “run the place”. In fact, they had the political clout and the human rights support to back them up.