Crime and tourism

IN THE wake of JAPEX, the tourism showcase, Kingston returned to normal on Monday with violence in the east and west. Off Mountain View Avenue, some distance from last month's battleground, another policeman died along with another man in a disputed shoot-out.

And along the Mandela Highway, in the west, two alleged desperadoes died on a bus they had hijacked in a bullet-spattered flight from policemen.

JAPEX was staged over four days amid buyers and sellers of the tourism product and was focused in the relative safety of the heart of New Kingston. And apart from the trading, there must have been the tacit hope that the seamier side of the capital city would lie low for the duration.

The visiting delegates winding down the event on Monday would hardly have missed hearing about the latest four deaths in the spate of violence that plagues this society.

Tourism interests for the most part dread any publicity about violent crime; and since some sections of the capital are crime-ridden, the notion of Kingston becoming a tourism mecca is probably viewed with scepticism.

But there is another view worth considering. The foreign delegates to JAPEX would have had little sense of being exposed to the danger which erupted in two sections of the city on Monday; no more so than if they had spent the four days on the beaches of Negril.

In short, they could have gotten a more accurate perspective of localised incidents which when reported abroad get compressed into a single geographic entity ­ so that Negril or Ocho Rios is synonymous with 'Jamaica'.

That said, we wish the returns from JAPEX will be more positive than negative. But we also wish that the planners who have high hopes for Kingston as a major tourist town will not abandon a sense of reality about the potential dangers.

It would be foolhardy to expect that promotional hype is all its takes to erase the scourge of gun crime which is reeling too close to uncontrollable anarchy.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner.

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