My Friend P has this warped matter-of-fact theory that deep down we are all the same. P claims that women are just like men, and the guilty are just like the innocent.

We won't even start on the 'women are just like men argument', except to say that I have written on this before and on the levels of faithfulness or rather unfaithfulness, and the ability to do the deed. Yes, some women can be just like men, and worse if tested.

But let's stick to the innocent/guilty theory. P stresses that the innocent are merely the guilty yet to be caught and, as time goes by, we will hardly know the difference between the two types of people. I am not at that core level of cynicism yet, but an incident that I heard of recently has left me wondering hmmmm.

Figure this. A man gets robbed in the wee hours of the morning. He alerts his neighbours and calls the police. The police say they are coming over but since no one is dead the man is not holding his breath for the police to come. He has lost his keys outside in the robbery and his neighbours are helping him to search for the keys.

Along come the cops who do live in understandable fear of being killed, as they are cops. They head off to the scene of the crime in an unmarked vehicle, and are not in uniform. This is an approach which is thought sometimes to be safer for the cops. They reach the victim's property and see the male neighbour in the dark. The neighbour sees a strange car with males aboard entering the property in the dark, he thinks it is the robbers returning, so he runs. The cops see the running neighbour and they too think it is the robber returned, now running. They open fire, the neighbour is shot.

So going back to P's theory, here we had the innocent/guilty neighbour being shot by the innocent/guilty cops! You see the decision to run made the innocent neighbour appear guilty to the cops whom he thought were the guilty robbers. What a mix up! But given the thoughts in the unfortunate neighbour's mind if the cops were indeed robbers, then running was the brave thing to do in the quest to preserve life.

It is a frightening state of affairs if you live in a perpetual state of fear and looking over one's shoulder, eventually, no one knows who to trust. Many of us get those thoughts when stopped by the traffic cop and you get the odd and seemingly pointless question: "Where do you work?" smartly poised. How germane is the answer to this question to your speed, or any other traffic offence you might have committed?

When it comes to crimes of hard violence or even fraud, the question indeed is whom do we trust? Labels no longer carry the weight they once did, the policeman, the teacher, the nurse, the inspector of police, the senior civil servant, the principal, the pastor, none of these titles means much any more as far as honesty and trust are concerned.

But I do live in hope that there are a few people who will forever stand out there as pure paragons of goodness. People who, even in the face of all that is wrong with the world, will forever do the right thing - even if it means bad for them. I like to think that I might be one of them.

Perhaps. P, laughs, for now, he says email your comments to:

myfriendp@hotmail.com