Police receive helping hand from Michigan
With crime emerging as the number one concern of Belizean citizens, there is no shortage of advice on how to improve the situation. Unfortunately, most of that advice is based on little more than gut feeling and raw emotion. For the last two weeks, a team of criminal justice professionals from Northern Michigan University has been on a fact-finding mission here to see how their institution can lend a hand in the fight against crime. While admitting that no foreign expert can provide all the answers for our problems, professor Bob Hanson told News 5 that there is a body of world-wide knowledge and opportunities available to improve law enforcement in Belize.
Bob Hanson, Northern Michigan University
“We notice that there is strong emphasis here in the Police Department on community policing, well, we’ve got information about specific programmes. And, after talking with the officers here, we’re coming up with some possible recommendation on things that they could do to reach out to young people in a pro-active way, to try to prevent the kinds of social conditions that lead to the deterioration of the relationship between the police and the public.”
Stewart Krohn
“From what you’ve seen, how critical is the basic problem of lack of resources?
Bob Hanson
“It’s absolutely unbelievable to us about what the police in particular are expected to do with what they are provided with. We were really quite frankly… There’s two parts to that, on the one hand, the willingness of the people we talk to, the professionalism, the interest in actually doing the job. And, the difficulty and the frustration they face when they are not provided with fingerprint power, they don’t have enough gasoline to operate the patrol vehicles. But, there are other problems that don’t have anything to do with financial resources, they have to do with some recommendations perhaps we could make to increase the effectiveness of the management scheme, to make some adjustments in the way the patrols are deployed.
Everybody in this country knows what they’re up against, we had a rally while we were here, that’s unprecedented, we’ve never heard of such a thing. The people are standing up and saying we want justice, that’s a powerful message to any politician about the depth of the people’s feelings.
But if I could speak personally, not on behalf of the university, I think that Belizeans, your country in under attack. The barbarians are not at the gate, they are on the street corner. There are deportees who’ve been to a master’s degree in crime behaviour on the streets of Los Angeles, and Houston and New York. You’ve got an immigration, a porous border, where it’s difficult to control immigration. The economy needs strengthening, there are all kinds of factors here that can combine to really threaten the existence of a stable democracy, a wonderful place to live, a wonderful place to raise a family. But if people are afraid of crime, if they must give up important liberties to them, it threatens the stability of a government. I’m not sure people here really understand the depth of the threat that they’re facing.”
Hanson and his associates are here under the Partners for the Americas programme. They will be setting up a mechanism under which Belizean police officers can attend Northern Michigan University’s police academy and also have access to the technology and expertise of their crime laboratory.
