MONTEGO BAY, St James – Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Clifford Chambers, commander of the Area One Police Division, has vowed to take decisive action to immediately arrest the breakdown of public order in the downtown area of the resort city of Montego Bay.

“…One thing for sure is that the disorder that is in train now in the second city, cannot and will not be allowed to continue. We have to deal with it now,” ACP Chambers declared.

The senior cop, who heads the police divisions in the parishes of Trelawny, St James, Hanover and Westmoreland, hinted that the police’s elite Quick Rapid Response unit, headquartered in Montego Bay, will be called upon occasionally to assist in the maintaining of order in the city.

“I will be speaking with the commander of St James. We have a tactical formation that moves around in the public space and when they are not on call treating with anything specific, we will ask them to pay some attention to the issue because there is no doubt the city of Montego Bay has outgrown its physical space. The streets are not wide enough, we have seen over 32,000 new vehicles registered on the streets of Montego Bay in the last year or so and as a result of that, congestion cannot be avoided. And so, if it cannot be avoided, it means that it has to be managed. And so public order and traffic management are areas that I know need some attention and we will be giving it some attention,” he pledged.

Members of the business community and pedestrians have over the years complained bitterly over illegal street vending, conducted mainly on sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to walk in the roadway, as well as taxi operators illegally parking in Sam Sharpe Square and other no parking areas.

“It’s very horrible. The whole place is a tent city and you have a taxi stand in Sam Sharpe Square and, on the other side, on Jamaica National the whole place is crowded with food vendors, illegal vendors, over 20 of them. In the evenings you cannot get any space to walk. I think there are any sidewalks for the people to walk anymore in this town,” complained one business operator, making reference to the historic Sam Sharpe Square.

“We have to understand our civic responsibility. We can’t have a nasty place and call Montego Bay the tourism mecca of Jamaica and the Caribbean. You can’t have one of the best airports in the whole Caribbean and then you take a few minutes, ride downtown and it’s a horrible state of affairs,” added the businessman, who did not want to be named.

Mayor of Montego, Councillor Leeroy Williams, recently blamed the police for failing to consistently partner with the municipal police to enforce public order.

“What’s happening to the JCF [Jamaica Constabulary Force]…they need to work in collaboration with the municipal police. It is just enforcement that is the problem because they (police) know exactly what they are to do,” stressed Williams, who is also chairman of the St James Municipal Corporation.

“And you see when you are doing enforcement you have to be consistent, you can’t go today and you talk to them and then you leave them. You can’t do that, you have to be at them daily. So that’s just the problem. It just needs proper enforcement, that’s the only answer.”

ACP Chambers said that he will be making every effort to sit with the municipal corporation to strategise how best to partner with the municipal police.

“What I want to do is to at least have a sit down with the municipal persons and to just iron out clearly what is their understanding of the sphere of their responsibility,” said ACP Chambers.

He reasoned that with the limited number of police officers, it is only by way of better coordination and cooperation that “we can at least fix the mandate”.

Mayor Williams also underscored that it is difficult to maintain order in the city due to the woefully inadequate quota of municipal police.

“Right now we need a complement of 50 and what we have is about 24. We just have half of what we would need,” he stressed.

Williams further disclosed that as a result of the coronavirus pandemic the revenue stream of the municipal corporation, resulting in insufficient funding to recruit new staff members, including municipal police.

“So we are not in a position per se to take on persons. Even though vacancies are there, we don’t have the money to pay them. So that is the problem right now,” he expressed.