Port Antonio mayor calls for plan to deal with mentally ill street people

PORT ANTONIO, Portland:

Mayor of Port Antonio Paul Thompson is to engage stakeholders to address the overwhelming number of mentally ill persons on the streets of the resort town, and craft a plan to care for their basic needs.

Thompson said that the situation had been brought under control recently, but admitted that there have been several new faces among the groups in areas of the town.

The mayor says that with the situation threatening to get out of hand, he will be engaging the street people committee and other stakeholders, including the chamber of commerce, the police, the Ministry of Health, and non-profit organisations to come up with a master plan to deal with the chronic situation.

On the agenda will be the provision of a facility where the mentally ill can be cared for daily, while offering warm meals, administering regular medical check-ups, and giving them a bath daily.

On Monday, no fewer than eight mentally ill persons were seen along the sidewalk at FirstCaribbean Bank.

Reports generally are that they pose a security threat and have been defecating along the corridors of the busy commercial strips of Harbour, West, and William streets.

With many of them homeless, some have occupied piazzas and sidewalks, forcing students, the elderly and others to walk on to the roadway.

Councillor for the Port Antonio division, Dexter Rowland, said the situation is now at crisis point.

“We know the regular people that roam the streets of Port Antonio, but almost every week now we see at least two or three new faces in the town,” said Rowland.

“And what is really frightening is that some of them, especially the men, they are armed with knives and, in some instances, a machete. A person of unsound mind does not think like the normal human and so you could be passing them along the street and before you know what happened, you are stabbed or chopped.”

Rowland also accused the police and Portland Municipal Corporation of being powerless to remove them, and cited sexual deviance as a concern.

“But now the amount of people of unsound mind on the streets in Port Antonio is frightening and it gets worse by the week. People are having sex including oral sex on the corridor of one commercial bank in broad daylight,” the councillor said.

“And we have students passing by. I am sure that this is not something that we as citizens of this town want our children to be exposed to. They have become increasingly aggressive and I hate to think what could happen to the innocent and law-abiding people of this town.“

gareth.davis@gleanerjm.com