New Measures at Police Checkpoints to Catch Transient Criminals

Chester Williams

Commissioner of Police Chester Williams says that it’s a strategy being implemented by the department in the wake of a number of missing persons being abducted and taken to isolated areas to be murdered. Here’s how he explains it.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“Over the past years, we have had a number of persons who had gone missing, particularly from Belmopan and Belize City, and those persons would later turn up dead in other jurisdictions. Just to name a few, we have the incident with Mister Foster, we have Miss Roches, we have Miss Coc, we have Mister Bowman, we have Mister Brooks; we have Mister Gentle. We have the customs woman who was kidnapped in Benque at one point in time and thankfully, police were able to intercept. And you have recently, the case where police caught five young men beating another near Tapir Hotel in Belize City. That’s just to name a few. Because of the fact that we are seeing an increase in these types of activities, as the primary law enforcement agency in this country, we cannot sit and do nothing. We have to do something to be able to ensure that we police our highways in such a way that the criminal elements will not feel as comfortable as they currently are committing their crimes on our highways. You know to every time these crimes occur, people normally as the question—and rightfully so—what are the police doing? Why the police check point never picked it up? And they are right. And so because of this, we saw it prudent to implement new measures at our checkpoint. We must also be mindful that separate and apart from the whole issue of persons going missing, there are other demons that are involved in the use of our highways. We have drunk drivers. I can tell you this year alone, we have had a number of traffic fatalities resulting from drunk driving. And we still have not looked at the issue as it relates to the transhipment of drugs and firearm into our country, coming from across the borders. And even sometime from within the country itself.”