The issue of tourist harassment in Ocho Rios, St Ann has again become topical and the usual remedy of more police and more courtesy corps personnel is being prescribed. The reality, that policymakers are hiding from, is that tourist harassment in Ocho Rios is inevitable and will not go away for now, given what our politicians have done and/or have allowed to be done to Ocho Rios. Ocho Rios has seen the mushrooming of a number of informal settlements and squatter settlements adjacent to the town centre. There is high unemployment in these informal communities and most of the persons residing in these communities are brought into the area, or encouraged to come into the area primarily to boost electoral support for politicians. Put bluntly, the occupants of these communities are by and large treated as “Cannon fodder” during the election process. When election is on, the citizens of these communities become extremely important and are visited frequently by politicians who make all sorts of promises to them. However when there is no election pending, these citizens are left to fend for themselves and then they have no choice but to come into the town of Ocho Rios to see what they can find to do are simply “hussle” in order to survive. This “hussling” involves offering tour guide services to tourist walking the town or if they have a car try to get tourists to go on tour as their passengers.
GRAB AND FLEE
In a few, unfortunate, instances it involves “grab and run” theft. That is grabbing a purse, a hand bag, a cell phone or jewellery from a tourist or local and then runing off with it. There is also an increased number of persons living on the streets in Ocho Rios some of whom are mentally challenged. From what can be seen and learnt from several of these persons, they are not originally from St. Ann and one has to ask the inevitable question: Are there instances of street persons being dumped in the town of Ocho Rios? The condition of Ocho Rios is simply a disgrace. The town is filthy, disorganized and “Chaka Chaka”. The entire market area is anything but part of a tourist resort and there is no indication that the St Ann Parish Council can rise to the occasion and get Ocho Rios clean. Tourist harassment cannot be discussed in a vacuum. If you take or allow a mass of unemployed persons to come and reside adjacent to a tourist resort, you are naive if you expect those persons — being unemployed, and in many instances unemployable — to sit and die of hunger rather than to hustle and harass tourists. But it is not only the unemployed who are harassing tourists. Several of the licensed tour operators line the street from the port, aggressively inviting tourists to engage their services for a tour. Each cruise ship day, tourists walking into the town traverse a gauntlet of tour operators, mini bus drivers and taxi drivers, all of whom are inviting the tourist to hire them for a tour. It must be annoying and bothersome for a tourist to have to traverse this gauntlet of harassment. Ocho Rios needs proper management and control. The multiplicity of entities of with responsible for tourism in general and for Ocho Rios in particular has failed to protect Ocho Rios and it is not surprising that fewer and fewer cruise ships are keeping Ocho Rios as a destination. From all indications Ocho Rios will become less and less attractive so long as the authorities continue to fail to deal with the fundamentals in that resort.
