MEMBERS of the hotel sector and the Opposition have said that last Wednesday’s nine-hour shoot-out between police and gunmen inside Canterbury in St James should serve as a wake-up call for Government about the need to tackle the poor economic and social conditions that promote criminality.

Further, they have said that stronger action was needed against criminals, and civilians needed to recognise their own role in the process.

“I just think that Government has to take some stronger action, and I am not talking about a state of emergency,” Godfrey Dyer, president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, told the Sunday Observer. “But I think some stronger and stricter action can be taken to curb crime. And I am not just addressing the tourist industry. I am talking about curbing crime generally for all of us because if crime is down, then we need not worry about the tourists.

“So, I want to see some strong action and based on some of the things that have happened before, this (incident) should awaken the Government as to what is happening…” he added.

At the same time, he said that people needed to recognise their own civic duty to help curb crime and to build the country.

“We just hope people will srealise that Jamaica belongs to us and we must not destroy it,” the JHTA head said.

On October 15, police and soldiers battled gunmen who put up fierce resistance when the security forces entered the depressed Canterbury community near the northcoast resort city of Montego Bay, to carry out an operation to nab criminals and seize illegal weapons.

The team of 80 policemen traded heavy fire with the gunmen for about nine hours. The incident left three cops injured, an equal number of gunmen dead and a host of other men and one woman were taken into custody. In mopping-up operations afterwards, the lawmen recovered several guns and a large quantity of ammunition.

Horace Peterkin, general manager of Sandals Montego Bay, called for better social and economic conditions in Canterbury and similarly deprived areas. He said that politicians had to begin to look beyond the acquisition of votes if they were to achieve those objectives.

“The inner cities that we have in Montego Bay exist now in the forms that they exist — which are really terrible — because when the first one started we could have arrested it. But when one set of people try to stop it, the other side come in and say ‘you can’t touch these people’ because they want to protect their votes and I am talking about 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago,” he said.

“Now there is unemployment and the social and the physical infrastructures are terrible… We never sat down and planned properly, which in my mind is what the Government should do. They should be looking at a 10- to 25-year plan instead of squandering the money like they have done. The amount of money that we have squandered in this country, we could have made this country an absolute paradise,” added Peterkin, who also heads the local chapter of the JHTA.

He said the business community, including Sandals resorts, had been trying to help improve the conditions in some of the areas. But, he said, businesses simply were not profitable enough to do more than they have so far undertaken to do.

“The business community can help to a certain degree and if the business community wasn’t giving the kind of help that it is giving now, the situation would have been much worse,” he said. “I can tell you that many of the hotels, including the Sandals group, and different companies down here contribute to all kinds of things… But that is not their real business… They cannot be asked to bear the burden of what Government collects taxes for,” he said.

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in the wake of the flare-up called for a crime summit for the parish to identify solutions that could provide area youths with viable alternatives to crime.

“There is too much urban blight and I think the summit can really tackle that. What we have now are young people who don’t have role models, so they gravitate towards gangs,” Clive Mullings, the member of parliament for East Central St James, told the Sunday Observer.

“The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Imagine calling young people ‘shottas’; there’s a sort of romanticism now of the gunman thing,” Mullings added.

JLP deputy leader, Ed Bartlett, joined the call for a detailed examination of the social and economic situation in all squatter settlements or otherwise low-income areas across the city.

“People have been excusing the crime in Montego Bay and elsewhere on the basis of all kinds of reasons, rather than dealing with what is at the root of the specific criminal activity in the specific area,” Bartlett said. “The fact is that although crime, overall, is rampant, there are specific types of crime in specific areas and Montego Bay’s main problem is drugs and guns. And so one has to get to the root of what those problems are and be not afraid to eradicate it.

“The police and the community must be at one in dealing with the causes of these problems and the methodology for dealing with it,” Bartlett added.