LESS than a mile east of Montego Bay’s Sam Sharpe Square, about 4,000 people are crammed into a few hundred square feet, all sharing the postal address of twelve-and-a-half Upper King Street.

One of the resort city’s 17 squatter settlements, the densely populated community of Canterbury mostly consists of flimsy board houses, tightly packed together. The inner-city community with a history of internal gang warfare stole the nation’s spotlight in the 1970s, and again yesterday when armed men engaged members of the security forces in a nine-hour gun battle.

Described as ‘a working class cum depressed area that is densely populated, where you can stand in the middle and throw stones to either end of the community’, Canterbury has earned a reputation of violence. About a month ago, the bodies of two young men were found there, in a shallow grave of layers of dirt and cement.

The community has never been able to entirely shake off its rough image, with sound systems and DJs from the 80s and 90s using Canterbury and Flankers — another inner-city section of Montego Bay — as models of ‘bad manism’ in their ‘gun tunes’ and ‘dubplates’.

That image is fostered by outsiders’ reluctance to enter the community, a section of which is nestled in a deep valley that is then surrounded by hilly terrain. Although there is only one entrance and exit by road, there are many footpaths that are often used by those who wish to elude the police.

Widely known as an area where guns, which are freely available, are often used to settle disputes, yesterday’s spectacular standoff with the police was unusual.

“The gang warfare has not been dormant, but yesterday’s exchange with the police is an anomaly,” said Montegonian Alan Bernard, a part time lecturer at UWI, and a community liaison officer for Kingston’s inner-city areas.

“Normally you have a one man warring with another, or Canterbury against Paradise, Canterbury against Flankers, and so on, but not such a large-scale gunfight — with the police at that,” he added.

Dr Chang has pointed to the high unemployment levels as one of the major contributing factors for the despair in the community.

“Nobody wants to employ them once they know they are from Canterbury, so outside of the few higglers who vend their wares at the Charles Gordon Market or peddle along Orange Street, they are mainly peddlers who sell marijuana or those who hustle on the beach,” said Lloyd B Smith, political analyst and managing editor of the Western Mirror.

“Before they closed the Free Zone area, more women from the community worked there, but now this is not so, and so there has been a very high unemployment rate for many years now,” he added.

There has been a flare-up of violence in the western end of the island over the past few months, and there has been speculation that criminal elements may have migrated from other sections of the island into St James and other western parishes.

“Outsiders may have infiltrated the area. Because of its hilly and bushy terrain, Canterbury is and has always been a good hiding ground for criminals who in turn share their spoils with the residents,” Smith said, adding that not all the community members are on the wrong side of the law.

Over the years, there have been rumours that politicians have supplied residents with guns; but yesterday, Dr Chang rejected that notion, claiming that some community members were already heavily armed.

“If you take guns to these areas it’s like taking coal to Newcastle,” he said on the morning radio talk show, The Breakfast Club.

Over the years, the community has been tribalised along political lines and the problem has now been exacerbated by the absence of any identifiable community leader.

“There was a time when you could pinpoint a leader, but presently there is no such person and this is part of the problem,” Smith explained. There were reports, yesterday, that a deportee who had recently arrived in the area was recruiting young men as he tried to put together a “one order” gang.