Police Commissioner Says it is All About Revenge

The Belize Police Department, along with the Conflict Resolution and Behavior Modification Service, staged a recent intervention to try and broker peace between feuding gangs in the city.  Over the extended weekend, a number of street figures were rounded up and held in detention, before a session was held with Commissioner of Police Chester Williams, Nuri Muhammad and Abdul Nunez of C.Y.D.P.  During an appearance on Channel Five’s Open Your Eyes this morning, the ComPol shared his view about what the gang members are really after.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“What is the need of the gang member other than to retaliate for the death of a colleague of his.  Are we then to fulfill that need for him to retaliate?”

Bryton Codd

“But is that the need, ComPol?”

Chester Williams

Chester Williams

“That is the need.  Whenever you sit with these people and you ask why, “Well, he kill my friend, soh I just kill one ah dehn.”

Bryton Codd

“So how do you go about preventing something like that from happening?”

Chester Williams

“It is extremely difficult in the sense that when we had the first shooting in the St. Martin’s area, we did all we could have to saturate the area, to conduct operations in the area, to lock down some of them who we believe would have retaliated, but there’s so much and what did they do?  They ventured out of St. Martin’s and went and killed somebody somewhere else.  So the need that they have is to retaliate and we are not going to yield to them retaliating, we are going to do what we do to prevent it.  And I don’t agree with you that the police have been more reactive because if you look at our daily patrols, we are patrolling these gang-ridden areas, we are conducting house searches, we’re conducting person searches, we’re conducting vehicle searches, we are talking with these gang members.  We are doing what we can from a reactive standpoint, but indeed when something does occur, because our proactive approach is not going to prevent everything from occurring, but when something does occur, we have to react.  And while yes, it is easy to quantify the amount of murders that occur, we are never going to be able to quantify the amount of murders that the police efforts prevented.”