Crime, Crime, Crime! What’s the Ministry’s New Strategy?

John Saldivar

Minister of National Security John Saldivar and six senior officers of the Police Department conducted a mid-year review succeeded by a release issued earlier this week. There has been a change in the Eastern Division where there are currently three commanders for the wider Belize District and two new police jurisdictions will be opened in Cayo South and Stann Creek. It’s all in an effort to address the growing crime situation in the country says, Minister John Saldivar.

John Saldivar, Minister of National Security

“First of all, in terms of the statistics from the first six months, we noted the downward trend in major crimes, but noted that we continue to have some challenges with respect to murders. We also noted that those challenges seem to be shifting to more domestic and personal conflict issues and we’ve looked at a strategy toward to try to deal with that new challenge that’s facing us. We have gone ahead and broken down the eastern division into three areas. Basically eastern division used to cover the entire Belize district, but we found that it was just getting too big for one person to be the officer in charge and so, we believe that this is going to be a better fix and have senior officers being in charge of a smaller area. Though a lot of the focus has been on the crime taking place in the city, we do have some hotspots across the country. The Cayo south area and especially the Roaring Creek Camalote area, being one of them. If you will note compared to last year, we have fifteen murders already in that area compared to last year that we had five; I believe that is the correct number. And then we’ve had representations from the B.T.B. and the B.T.I.A. with respect to the rising crime situations in the Hopkins area. And so we’ve been thinking about for some time now forming a sub-formation that will cover those four villages that we’ve mentioned which is Hopkins, Silk Grass, Kendall and I believe Maya Center…sorry, Sittee River.”