West Kingston MP Desmond McKenzie pepper-sprayed by police in Tivoli Gardens

West Kingston Member of Parliament Desmond McKenzie was pepper-sprayed by police on Wednesday morning in Tivoli Gardens, Kingston, amid tense scenes that followed a police shooting of a man in the community.

Videos that circulated soon afterwards showed Mr McKenzie receiving help to ease the spray from his eyes, and others consoling him after the encounter. He said he rushed to the area after residents telephoned him, reporting that officers who had shot a man were refusing to take the injured person to hospital.

According to Mr McKenzie, anger over that delay made the community restless and led to confrontation with the police. He said he was attempting to calm the situation when he was sprayed.

He recounted an exchange involving an officer and a woman in the crowd. He said he was told the officer made a remark to her about her mother, which she repeated back, and that she then ran behind him. Feeling her at his back and seeing the officer, he said he raised his hand and asked the officer to hold on — and was pepper-sprayed three times without any reply.

"Officer, I hold up my hand and I said, 'Officer, what is it? Hold on.' And without a word he pepper sprayed me three times," Mr McKenzie said.

He rejected any suggestion that the use of spray was accidental or justified. He said nothing underway at that moment warranted it, noting he saw only one stone thrown well before the spraying, and that there were no broken bottles and no attempt by residents to block roads. Noise from the crowd, he said, came from people who were upset.

Asked whether he had been obstructing officers in their duties, he denied it, saying he had been speaking with police before he was sprayed. He also said he later walked with officers and that the injured man was eventually taken away. He dismissed a police claim that residents had stopped officers from removing the man as untrue.

Residents pointed to grounds near Ebenezer Methodist Church in Tivoli Gardens — a building they describe as nearly 200 years old — as the scene of the morning’s shooting, saying the man was hit close to the church perimeter fence. They described the shooting as unprovoked and said it had damaged trust built with the police in recent years, after what they characterised as a rocky relationship in earlier times.