By Al Edwards, Business Co-ordinatorON FRIDAY November 29, the Gleaner Company held a forum in Montego Bay with the aim of hearing the concerns of the more rural regions of the country. The Managing Director of the Gleaner Company and President of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), Oliver Clarke, presided as chairman of what proved to be a most instructive debate with regional leaders from both the private and public sector raising a host of issues including crime, road conditions, agriculture, tourism, casinos, homelessness, housing and unemployment.
Here are extended extracts from that forum.
Mark Kerr-Jarrett President of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce
ON LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE
I think we have been very fortunate with regards to the infrastructure investments that have taken place in and around Montego Bay. We have the South Gully which is complete; the North Coast Highway segment 1, Montego Bay to Negril, is complete. But the only item there, of course, is the stray animals and to deal with the speed at which people travel and the accident rate. The Howard Cooke/Alice Eldemire Drive is in the process of being upgraded into a dual carriage way and that should alleviate some of the congestion that is taking place on a daily basis, especially during rush hours.
We are looking forward to the cruise ship pier improvement promised by the Port Authority, especially now that they have the head tax to use to their benefit. The other item that we are watching very closely is the status of the Montego Bay bypass. That will be needed very shortly. However, there is a school of thought that says once the dualisation of Howard Cooke and Alice Eldemire take place that should alleviate a lot of problems there.
We do need a proper facility for our vendors who are now on the streets, especially at night. I would like to congratulate the police on the way they are able to maintain a vendor-free environment, especially during the day on St. James Street, but we do need a proper facility to put them in.
ON TOURIST HARASSMENT
AND CLEANLINESS
I think the business with tourist harassment is pretty much being held at bay by the Resort Patrol in the Hip Strip area. However, we do have problems with the general condition of the city and its cleanliness. There is an animal problem there too. One of the two proposals being put forward is to put a Municipal Court in place which would then garner the revenues which are not now being collected such as fines for traffic and parking violations, littering, and other municipal code infractions, including building and zoning infractions, and have those revenues kept locally, whether for municipal wardens or some kind of local police force.
ON MONTEGO BAY'S HOMELESS POPULATION
We have over 70 on the streets of Montego Bay now, and for their own safety and well-being we need to deal with them as a nation because we are responsible for those that cannot take care of themselves.
Winston Dear Head of Dear Group of Companies:
THE MONTEGO BAY BYPASS
The Prime Minister had promised that he would have come down last month to tell us where the bypass road was going to be. Up to this point we have had no communication. One of the big problems that we still have to face with the improvement of the Howard Cooke and Alice Eldemire Drive is that the highway ends in a very narrow road. Gloucester Avenue we call it the Hip Strip is a restricted area for traffic, and rightly so. It is the only area in Jamaica which is completely devoted to tourism and we should protect that.
Queen's Drive, the upper road, was never designed as a highway but a sub-division that was done back in the 1950s. The alignment of that road and its width, and even the reservations, do not support commercial traffic. Unless we can find alternative routes to the airport from the west, the congestion will not be alleviated to any great extent by fixing the Howard Cooke and Alice Eldemire Road.
Congestion is one of the issues that I have been speaking to our local traffic authority about. I have been telling them for over a year now that if they don't do something about it the city will die like downtown Kingston, and what you are going to have is businesses moving out of town.
In effect it has happened, and maybe the next big shock for the city is going to be when the City Centre, the in-bond trade, moves out of the city. They have already started that process and they will complete it, I would think, in about two years.
Myrtle Dwyer Admin. Officer, Half Moon Hotel
TOURISTS AND TRAFFIC
There is a lot being spoken about this particular end of this city, but I am at the eastern section, at Rose Hall. I am going to speak - because maybe that's the only language I know - on behalf of tourists. When I leave the Sangster International Airport and I veer left towards Rose Hall, I could be held up any time from 30 minutes to an hour, and this is the problem.
When you get to Flankers, that also is a bottleneck. Not to discredit what is happening in this end of the city, but the largest number of hotel rooms is on the eastern side.
MOBAY'S PHYSICAL
INFRASTRUCTURE
In the city itself, there is danger to life, in the sense that we have open manholes that I have seen pictures of people falling into and hurting themselves, whether it be on Barnett Street, St. James Street or otherwise. There is a lot of danger.
And, I believe the time is now to look at the disposal of the water in the city; it is still running on the street. Not many major cities have water on their streets. I don't want what any kind of water it could be sewage, it could be rainwater running on the surface.
People who live in Montego Bay are still disposing of their waste on the surface, which then runs in the drains of Montego Bay.
Lee Bailey Exec Director, Caribbean Cruise Shipping and Tours
REPORTING JAMAICA'S PROBLEMS
I want to take a different angle here. First of all, I want to look at The Gleaner itself. Based on what we discussed here, I believe The Gleaner's role can be two-fold:
To carry the news that is happening of the day, and
To carry the positive part of Jamaica, because we are not all that bad.
There are a few things in Jamaica that are bad. The type of news that we are carrying is
damaging Jamaica, as well as some of the statements we make. It's an internal matter and we have to deal with it internally. That's not a political statement, it's a statement that we need to face as a fact. It's our country and we have got to protect it when we can.
Walking the streets
When I was president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce, I lobbied extensively for the roads. The road between the airport and the Ritz-Carlton at Rose Hall has never in the last 28 years been given any attention at all - and it's a tourist area. We have the Ritz out there now. When you go to the Ritz and turn in you are relieved that you came off the main road, and it should not be so.
Secondly, is that nobody in the administration has recognised that Jamaica is a tropical country, and people like to walk. Americans is the largest amount tourist and they like to go for a stroll. But, the all-inclusive has to discourage people from going outside because for one, there is no sidewalk.
Any tourist destination you go there are proper sidewalks. The hotels are not far away, it's three or four miles to the airport. There should be sidewalks on both sides with palm trees. It should be something for all of us to be proud of. That's sadly lacking and it's time the administration of this country wake up and understand that we are in a business to make money and this is where our bread and butter is. Everyone jumps and screams when there is no tourist, but public and private sector need to get together and understand that this is a business and we must work towards developing that business to benefit all Jamaicans.
Winston Dear
Can I just say something on the stray animals, because I believe that Government is guilty of not completing the North Coast Highway Project Phase 1 between Montego Bay and Negril and is recklessly dealing with people's lives. Part of the original contract was to have the highway properly fenced. Up to this point they have not put up any fencing and two people have died so far and many other people have wrecked their vehicles. You cannot have a high-speed road and don't put up fencing to protect the travelling public from stray animals.
Mark Kerr-Jarrett
The Chamber has been following on this project, especially the North Coast Highway segment 2, from Montego Bay to Ocho Rios. The Montego Bay to Falmouth leg is always a priority, because of the very items that Ms. Dwyer brought up. However, there is a reluctance to do it. The Montego Bay-Falmouth leg has actually been scheduled as the last leg in a 18-month to two-year project because people, I should say the Government is nervous about how to deal with Flankers, which is basically a squatter zone.
But it has to be dealt with because of the flooding that happens at Flankers, at the bottom of Kodak Avenue. As Ms. Dwyer said, people miss their planes coming in from the airport because we do not have an alternate route. People just won't grasp the mettle and do the job. The problem will not go away - like a sore or a cancer, it's only going to get worse. We would like this issue to be dealt with rapidly. The tourist season starts in a matter of weeks.
As Mr. Bailey said, this is our primary revenue earner. Only a fool does not reinvest the majority of their funds into their highest revenue earner in order to grow it and increase the revenue crop.
But the revenue is taken from here and spread around elsewhere and people then wonder why the product is deteriorating, and it's a very, very simple piece of analysis.
On homes for the homeless
The homelessness we have on the streets is not because of the lack of homes; it is because of their physical or mental condition. We have four types of homeless people: the economically destitute; the insane; the HIV positive; and you have the drug addict.
We are actually trying now to work with CUMI and the City Spirit Foundation together, as well as the Cornwall Regional Hospital through the Psychiatric Department there in order to promote CUMI's night shelter, which is somewhere where you can take the homeless after they come out of psychiatric treatment. CUMI will help in the administration of their medication and put them into a night shelter in order to try and reintroduce them back into their families.
G.L. Gause - Superintendent of Police
Crime in western Jamaica
More than ever before, we should forge a partnership that we can work together, because if you look at what is happening now, the police is conscious of the fact that we cannot, we will not be successful without the help of the public. There is some misconception as to who can or cannot be trusted, but there are mechanisms in place that could offset that.
Senior Superintendent Ellington:
Social intervention
In St. James for the past two years major crime such as murders, shootings, robberies, larcenies, break-in and sexual abuse have generally been trending down. Last year it went down by 20 per cent and this year to date a further 11 per cent.
Of those categories of crime, two stand out that are directly trending upward - that is murders and shootings, crimes of violence. What we find is that the city itself is experiencing decline in all categories but the inner city communities, residential communities, are having higher than normal levels of violent crimes.
The crimes against tourists have been trending down. In fact last year we recorded the lowest in ten years and this year seems to be turning out to be another good year. As a matter of fact, most of the reports of guest victimisation occurs on property and not on the streets.
What we do in terms of policing is, we are trying to make the community safe. We have, for example, a police unit known as the Tourism and Commerce Unit, which is dedicated to preserving the peace and keeping safe those areas used mostly by the tourists and the commercial district population.
We have community based policing projects in the inner city communities whereby we zone the communities into small manageable areas and assign police men and women on a permanent basis to serve those communities. We are having a fair amount of success in the rural districts. In some of the inner city communities we have relative levels of success; in others we continue to have difficulties and the difficulties are posed by a number of problems.
One has to do with the very unstructured nature of how the communities evolve. No roads, poor lighting, streets are not accessible, addresses are non-specific, there is internal rivalry - family on family, gangs on gangs - and the proliferation of drug abuse, teenage pregnancies, single female heads of households, broken families.
So all of those support systems that the family would provide and the social servicing would provide are absent in some of these areas and results in the kind of tension which we will never have enough policemen and women to detect early enough and to be present early enough to prevent the conflict.
I just want to echo what SSP Gause said earlier on about the fight against crime and violence. We need to make the distinction between violence in Jamaica and ordinary crime, because it is violence that is really putting us on the map.
I think that the social agencies need to pay much more attention to these inner city communities, because policing alone can't deal with the problems that they see. We have families that are carrying feuds for 10, 15 years and all the intervention by the police cannot solve it.
Assurance of public safety
That assurance has to come from both the police and residents. I go back to the issue of citizen on citizen violence, which is created by relationships that they build up in there, whether it's around drug deals, property crimes, how they actually came in possession of the lands in the first place, and the disputes that develop around that. We have situations where some residents have to walk through the yards of others to get to their place and when there is a dispute, residents are either locked out of the community or locked into their yards.
Now, if we can't find a way to resolve those issues we will always have the tension, we will always have the violence, and as long as you are out of it you are safe, but nobody wants to know they are in a community where there are 17 murders, whether or not they are safe. The assurance, as I say, has to come from the police, increasing our presence in there, increasing our intervention, arresting people, putting them away, but the residents must have a desire for peace. It's the only way.
Superintendent Gause
Police presence
The City of Montego Bay is probably the most heavily policed piece of public space in Jamaica, save and except when we have serious problems in downtown Kingston. This town has police out on beat duties as late as 1, 2 o'clock in the morning, and it has mobile patrols on a 24-hour basis. We have dedicated patrols in certain sections of the city, depending on the tourism interest, commercial interest and residential communities.
We recognise though, that we need additional policemen on the road. I don't believe that increasing the presence on our streets will drive away tourists, it might even bring a greater sense of reassurance. Certainly I believe that in the residential communities where we having the tensions and violence, stronger police presence would help.
We have a problem. Last year when we did an analysis of the needs for the division in terms of personnel, we realised that we needed one hundred more people to start doing police work. This year we are fifty more short than we were last year because of resignations, transfers, retirements, so we are worse off in the course of manpower, but we are trying to do a job with limited resources.
Gun control
In terms of gun control we have been recovering illegal guns from the streets of Montego Bay on an increased scale. Last year, we recovered nearly 60; this year to date we have gone over 40 already, which means that clearly there is a prevalence of guns on the streets of Montego Bay and the guns are featuring in the shootings and the murders, and they are used to terrorise some communities as well.
In terms of involvement of licensed firearm holders in shooting and all that, we don't have it. We don't have a lot of that. There have been one or two incidents in Montego Bay for the two years that I have been out here. What I do know and I am a bit worried about it, is that some licensed firearm holders allow criminal to take their guns from them and quite a few of guns that have been stolen in Montego Bay are stolen from licensed firearm holders.
Simon Browne - YS Falls
Mobilising people support
SSP Ellington told us very plainly what it is all about. I don't know if in the next ten years we are going to have enough policemen to do what we want to do. What I do know is that the citizens of this country are not prepared to be mobilised into taking back the streets and taking back their various areas from the criminals. Surely, these persons if they could mobilise themselves, I am sure the political parties can tell them how to
mobilise people into one area, and I think that if we could get those people who shut themselves in and talk like hell and don't do anything, so that we can let everyone know that this is our country and the goodies are going to win and the baddies have got to lose.
I don't see any real big change occurring unless we can mobilise the citizens to get together and make certain that if I know that this man is a criminal and he is my son, the police must be told.
John Morris - Superintendent of Police:
Public education campaign needed
Superintendent Gause in his opening remarks said that we cannot succeed without the help of the public. For too long we have been conditioned in this country to believe that crime is a police problem only, and I am not sure whether or not we have succeeded as a nation to educate our people that there is a distinct benefit in a low crime rate. I think the time is now ripe for the state to formulate a public education programme to condition people that there is going to be a better quality of life if we have a low crime rate.
There is going to be less demand on our health services, there is going to be more tourists coming here, there is going to be more investment coming here if we have a low crime rate, and I think that the time is now right for us to formulate a public education programme to get people to understand that you have a stake in all of this to ensure that we have a low crime rate.
Shalman Scott - Champagne Tours and Car Rentals
First of all, I would like to just underline a comment that was made by one of the officers in describing the state of relationship in the communities, where he observed that
what we are having now is family on family violence inside of the communities, in addition to the gang violence. That is very significant, because we have to recognise that the traditional concept of community has changed significantly. There was a time when people lived together, sharing common interests - now it is an aggregation of people coming together competing for supremacy, and therefore in light of that, whatever may be the discussion about crime, we need to pay attention to the changing nature and character of the community.
But my question to the officer is this: That part of the unusual type of violence that we are seeing in St. James, it is said that it is as a result of the presence of deportees in these communities. How true is this and also to what extent are deportees monitored and what sort of system do you have and is it working properly so that you can really keep a tab on the movement and activities of the deportees?
Oliver Clarke - Chairman
I'd like to say Jamaica I believe has about 4,000 people in jail. There are 16,000 Jamaicans in jail in the United States. There are probably 4,000 to 6,000 Jamaicans in jail in the United Kingdom. So there are probably five Jamaicans in jail abroad for every one
Jamaican here, which gives a kind of perspective to the comment that you have raised. Any comments on deportees at all.
SSP Ellington
Deportees do not contribute significantly to crime
I have never seen any evidence which has come out of research to show that deportees are contributing in any significant way to violent crimes in Jamaica. What I do know is that there are instances in which deportees have featured in certain new methods of carrying out criminal activities. For example, car jacking, extortions, drive by shootings and of late kidnappings. In the case of Montego Bay it's pretty much the same as it is across Jamaica.
We have had instances where one particular deportee may have featured in a number of homicides, and usually they run into us and they are captured. In terms of monitoring of deportees, there is legislation in place to enable Jamaica police to do it, but I am sure
all of you are aware of the difficulty we are having in getting the courts to issue monitoring orders. There is the celebrated case, I can't remember the details, but the court has turned down a request from the Commissioner of Police for permission to monitor a deportee on the grounds there is not sufficient basis for doing so. What I can say to you is
that we monitor them in pretty much the same way we would monitor any criminal suspect in the community.
Martin Hopwood - Bengal Farms Limited
Improve productivity to cut crime
The crime problem is serious indeed, but we are capturing criminals and locking them up and we are breeding more at the same time. One of the problems that we have, is that the policies that the administration have towards both agriculture and industry and the productive base of the economy is being undermined constantly. If people had more chance to get employment in both agriculture and industry you would find that there would be less of them on the streets to make trouble.
It is going to be impossible for the police to contain crime if they lock up three men and the next day you have four more out. Tourism cannot employ everybody.
Kenrick Davis - President of the Negril Chamber of Commerce
The future of tourism
I am a tourism man and every tip of blood in me is tourism. Tourism and crime and violence cannot grow at the same time, it doesn't work, and I find that a lot of our prominent people in Jamaica speak out of both sides of their mouth. We have to abhor crime at every level. You cannot say you trying to bring down crime and violence in one breath and in the other we are seeing you associating with the criminals.
Tools needed for the police
Secondly, the police are not given the tools to do the job. For example, in Negril we have been asking for transportation for the police. We were promised that they will send at least one more car. Until now it hasn't arrived yet. Sometimes the policemen are going out on raids and they have to ride on the back of motor cycles, as pillion. That's not good. We have to be very serious.
Let me tell you, the small hotels, those that have not died are dying and waiting to be buried, and people blame the all-inclusive concept for it. It's not so. The all-inclusive hotels are just trying to survive, consequently they have to discount their rate down to rock bottom, and as a result it affects the small hotels. If we don't do something serious about crime and violence those that are not dead yet are going to die. We really have to take some serious steps. We might have to look at the laws that we have on the books and make sure that we start to really put them in force or put new laws on the books where we can really work on this scourge of crime and violence. Some real drastic steps will have to be taken and we can't leave it to the police alone.
