Police Crackdown on Drinking and Weed-Smoking During Funeral Processions

The COVID regulations for funerals now allow for more than twenty people. But in the past two weeks, there have been two funeral processions which looked more like street fetes, complete with public drinking and marijuana smoking by some attendees. At today’s Police Press briefing, the department’s Communications Director said they will address the matter.

ASP Fitzroy Yearwood

ASP Fitzroy Yearwood, Communications Director, Belize Police Department

“We at the Police Department try our best to enforce social distancing and a lot of other stuff that you mentioned – these public drinking and honestly, when I saw the video that you are referring to, it looked like a J’ouvert. I honestly thought it was an old video but you the general public owe it to your family and yourselves to stay safe and healthy. And when you go out there and involve yourself in these irresponsible kinds of behaviour, and these clusters that you put yourself in, we at the Police Department can only do so much. For us to go into a situation like that, let’s say at a funeral, where there are hundreds of people and you only have so much police, that situation can turn volatile and then it could turn worse. So what we try to do is distance the people, try to talk to them. People were complaining about that same funeral on Saturday that they were doing some live event, video, and you can hear people talking over the pastor. We cannot control who goes to these events. We do not know who is related to the deceased, we can only ask you the general public – don’t put yourself out there if you don’t have to. When only a certain amount of people were allowed to go to funerals it was easy but we have noticed that since the amount of people allowed to mourn have been open it’s harder to control.”

Marion Ali

“But Sir, even if you don’t want to address the amount of people attending the funeral, the issue of public drinking, the issue of smoking weed on the streets are other violations that the police should enforce.”

ASP Fitzroy Yearwood

“I do agree. And that’s up to the officers on the ground to deal with the breaking of the law in their presence. I cannot answer for those officers out there but we instill that they do their job with due diligence.”