Mayor of Belize City Makes Plea for Safe Weekend

Bernard Wagner

As chief executive of Belize City, Mayor Bernard Wagner must also grapple with the issue of crime, despite not having much to do with policing. He too made a public plea to the criminal element to “hold it down” and not put their fellow residents in danger. He also addressed the actions of the police on Sunday.

Bernard Wagner, Belize City Mayor

“I want to reach out to the guys across the entire City, all Belize City residents: listen, we want a peaceful Easter weekend. We want to ensure that our residents feel safe, our residents want to feel secure, and so I’m making an outreach to those in the Mayflower area; I want to certainly extend an olive branch to them, on behalf of the City to work together. There must be something other than this crime: it paralyzes the entire community, it paralyzes people from moving around the City. I want to reassure the City residents that we will continue to work along with the Police Department, with the security forces to ensure the safety of all residents of the City.  I believe that they acted in a way where they felt that they wanted to protect the residents of not only the City, but also the residents of that immediate area. But at the same time, I have to reach out to the residents who live in that area and tell them there must be a better way. We want to ensure that all our residents in the City are safe and secure.”

Reporter

“And what actions is the council taking to try…”

Bernard Wagner

“We continue to put our action in progress; we have only been in office roughly ten days, so it will take some time to get things off the ground. But certainly we will be reaching out to all these agencies because we certainly don’t want to be replicating or duplicating any efforts, we want to enhance those efforts, and so we will be working with those other agencies in ensuring that we come up with a formula that works.”