ComPol Says It’s More Than Simply Re-branding

Chester Williams

According to Commissioner Williams, transforming the GSU requires more than just a name change, the culture that has become intrinsic within that unit also needs to be improved since it is part of the reason why the citizenry has become apprehensive of interacting with its officers.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“It is not just a re-branding and business as usual.  If we do a re-branding and it’s business as usual then we have not achieved anything.  It must be a re-branding and a change in direction and so what we had done is that we had put together a concept document in terms of what we want the unit to do and the most important thing that the unit must do is to be able to ensure that they gather actionable and timely intelligence on gang activities so that we can take appropriate action to be able to stem any gang flare ups in whatever parts of Belize City because we must understand, we have gangs among us and we’re not going anywhere right now and we must have a unit that will be able to deal with them.  But the only thing we must be careful of is in how we deal with them.  Are we going to treat them like human beings or are we going to treat them like animals?  And the truth is [that] GSU in the past has behaved to some extent like animals, treating people in a way that they should not be treated and we want to ensure that that is no longer the case.  And if it is that we change the name, we have the new concept document, if anybody feels that they cannot live up to that concept then they have to go.”