Major crimes down by 30%!
Major crimes are down across the board by a whopping thirty-percent in 2020. The Belize Crime Observatory has analyzed data compiled by the Belize Police Department and other agencies – and the numbers are looking better than 2019. In the major crimes category, for example, murders have decreased by over twenty-percent. Today, Technical Coordinator Adele Ramos of the Belize Crime Observatory shares more about the numbers and what their analysis shows on the shift in crimes recorded in Belize this year:
Adele Ramos, Technical Coordinator, Belize Crime Observatory
“These are five categories of crimes – burglary, robbery, murder, theft, unlawful sexual intercourse and rape. We see where, for all five categories, there has been a decline for the period January to December 2020 relative to the same period last year. So, overall, major crimes are down thirty percent. In terms of where we were last year, we also saw a decline in major crimes last year for the similar period however the decline that we have seen this year is far more substantial. So, last year’s decline is eight percent and this year’s decline is thirty-percent. A lot of that has to do with of course what has changed on the ground. We have had a lot of heavy policing on the ground, particularly in the context of enforcing COVID-19 measures but also targeted interventions by the Police Department to address gang violence, gang crimes and this is in advance of us even recording our first case of COVID-19 in Belize and that has been sustained over much of the period. So, those interventions actually account for this major decline in major crimes and particularly where we saw murders down by twenty-one percent for that period. So, the biggest decline of course is in the Belize District area but we see where, for example, in the cases of Corozal and Stann Creek there has been an increase; in Toledo it is on par of where it was for the same period last year. And when we look at the sex dimension male-females, about nine in ten of murder victims continue to be males.”
