Was 15 Year Old Involved in Queen Street Shootout a Psychopath?

Herbert Gayle

We took the opportunity to ask Gayle about the brazen shootout in front of the Queen Street Police Station, in which a fifteen year old minor wounded four persons, one of them a Police Officer. He explained that it may not be as dramatic as it seems, but it should certainly be a wake-up call.

Dr. Herbert Gayle, Anthropologist of Social Violence, UWI Jamaica

“One percent of the human species must have a little crack in their heads. So if you see an isolated case of a young man or a young girl – cause I’ve seen young women take up a gun and start firing – people have breakdowns, people get frustrated, people can be psychopathic. It doesn’t mean that all of us are going to jump up tomorrow and do the same thing. Cause people have a habit. They see something that is very dramatic and they go oh God, all of us are going to do it now. No we’re not all psychopaths, and we’re not all cracked. We’re not saying the young man is because people misunderstand the word psychopaths – they hear that and say oh my God and they get really emotional. We’re not saying your child is, we’re not saying the boy was. All I’m saying is simply this – an anecdotal frame doesn’t necessarily say this is what Belize has become or this is going to happen. I’ll give you a better example. There are kids who have sex at twelve years old and we all get very emotional, and they don’t have sex again until they’re eighteen even though everybody had said by next week they would do it again. In other words the human species doesn’t operate in the way we quite often think, so I would not overcook the soup on that incident. However it should be a warning that this is the extreme to which the human species can get if we constantly walk around feeling frustrated and helpless without actively doing something.”