THE 1999 dragooning of 32 street people from Sam Sharpe Square in Montego Bay is still remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in that city's recent history.
But while the numbers of such homeless indigents have multiplied since then there is now some hope for their plight. A refurbished night shelter has been opened at Albion, a suburb of the city. Previously operated by the Committee for the Upliftment of the Mentally Ill (CUMI), a non-government agency, the shelter will now be operated by the St. James Parish Council.
It was a Parish Council truck which had carted off the hapless street people in the dead of night and dumped them near a mud lake in St. Elizabeth. Not even the judicial enquiry into the episode was able to find the culprits and no person or agency ever admitted responsibility.
The Inspector of Poor attached to the Council has now pledged that the refurbished shelter will become one of the best such facilities in the island. The homeless are to be picked up and treated at the Cornwall Regional Hospital and those in need will be accommodated at the shelter.
The Second City needs this development even as a token of more positive things to happen amid a spate of negatives in recent times. The episodes at Canterbury and Flankers signalled the intrusion of criminal violence on a scale subsequently dramatised by Police Supt. Newton Amos' characterisation of the resort city as a 'drug den'. That portrait of a city in crisis is painted against the backdrop of a burgeoning murder toll; 99 have been killed since January. This has now prompted the impending dispatch of a special anti-crime unit to bolster police strength in Montego Bay.
Much more will have to happen in the physical infrastructure to foster a greater sense of civic pride in a city in which there is stark contrast between ramshackle on the one hand and the seeming opulence of the hotel sector on the other.
Vital as it is to the national economy, the image of a tourism paradise cannot be sustained if the rot of drug-related crime is allowed to take root. The street people episode was a shame and scandal. Embedded crime would need more than night shelters, refurbished or otherwise.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
