THE enforcement of law in Ocho Rios is gradually taking on the characteristics of an apartheid system. In a previous article I made mention that downtown Ocho Rios is treated entirely differently from uptown Ocho Rios. It does not take long for a visitor to or resident to realise that laws are enforced differently from the Moon Palace Jamaica Grande gate going west along Main Street from the same gate going east

Each morning a large number of courtesy corps officers walk from the Ocho Rios Police Station to Evelyn Street, Dacosta Drive, to the east of the Moon Palace Jamaica Grande gate and along Graham Street down to the tourist area of Ocho Rios, where they enforce laws in protection of tourists visiting Ocho Rios.

The authorities should be commended for this as nobody is against the enforcement of law and order in protection of the tourists visiting Ocho Rios. However it is wrong and a form of apartheid for the authorities to enforce the law in one area of the town and leave the other area of the town to lawlessness, chaos and indiscipline.

No one is allowed to play loud music in downtown Ocho Rios, no one is allowed to display their goods for sale in the thoroughfares of downtown Ocho Rios. There is order, decency, cleanliness and discipline downtown Ocho Rios. There are police officers on mobile and foot patrol downtown Ocho Rios.

When we compare and contrast downtown Ocho Rios with uptown Ocho Rios we find uptown Ocho Rios to be disorganised, chaotic and void of any enforcement of law. There is loud music along the roads of uptown Ocho Rios. It is difficult to walk along the sidewalks of uptown Ocho Rios as people display goods on most of the thoroughfares. In other areas uptown Ocho Rios there are open fires along the roadways. On the sidewalks kitchens, pots, pans, stove, and jerk grills are present. Business operators place loud speakers in front of their business places from which they blare lewd, loud and annoying music throughout the day. You dare not do that downtown Ocho Rios.

The authorities are treating the people who do business uptown Ocho Rios as “children of a lesser god”. In particular, the police have failed to enforce the Noise Abatement Act in uptown Ocho Rios. The Noise Abatement Act has provisions which restrict people from having loud speakers or any device emitting sounds that are audible beyond a distance of 100 metres. The Act also provides that no loud speakers should operate beyond 11:00 p.m. at night. These laws are not enforced in uptown Ocho Rios.

Squatters and all sorts of persons with no permanent place of abode operate loud sound systems for the entire night in uptown Ocho Rios. Some of these persons operate on the public roads, while others operate at the entrances to private premises. Police officers pass them, on their way to downtown Ocho Rios to enforce the very laws they do not enforce uptown Ocho Rios, without interfering with them.

The Town and Communities Act, at Section 5, provides restrictions against people displaying their goods for sale on thoroughfares. This law is admirably enforced by the police downtown Ocho Rios. However, not so uptown Ocho Rios. Uptown Ocho Rios is a free-for-all, with all and sundries displaying all sorts of goods and keeping open fires along the thoroughfare uptown Ocho Rios.

The authorities are creating in the minds of the citizens who occupy uptown Ocho Rios that they are less important than the business people, the residents and the tourists downtown Ocho Rios. This is a type of apartheid that should not exist in any country.

There are instances uptown Ocho Rios where doctors cannot properly hear their stethoscopes as music being played in the vicinity of their surgeries is so loud that it is causing their windows to vibrate and preventing them from carrying out their professional duties. The police have done nothing about the state of uptown Ocho Rios and the only explanation there could be is that the authorities, in particular the police, have decided that the law should be enforced differently in the two areas. There should not be one way of enforcing the laws in uptown Ocho Rios, that is to say allow anything to go, while at the same time the law is strictly enforced downtown Ocho Rios, which means that those persons are more important.

If this is not apartheid I challenge the authorities to tell me what this is. When citizens are discriminated against by the authorities, as is being done in Ocho Rios, then no one should be surprised to learn that those citizens do not take the law seriously; they do not support the enforcement of law and order; they do not trust the police; they believe that two standards are being applied and that the lesser standard is being applied to them.

Linton P Gordon is an attonery-at-law. Send comment to the Observer to lpgordon@cwjamaica.com.