Minister faces press on escalating crime
The Minister of National Security, Carlos Perdomo, faced a tough session with the press this morning – the reason, the undeniable increase in crime, in particular murders. There was plenty of talk of the police department’s Operation Cycle Breaker, introduced by the Police Department shortly after the Barrow administration took office. And as is evident, the six month old programme, according to the Minister, is falling short. So now another strategy has been unveiled that will upgrade the Department’s crime-fighting strategy.
Carlos Perdomo, Minister of National Security
“There are still cold-blooded murderers walking our streets. This is not acceptable. We will aggressively pursue these criminals until they are in jail where they belong. You ask about shortfall of policemen. I’m trying to tell you that it will take a while but we are doing some things immediately. It takes one month to train, it takes five, six months to train police officers. So I’m trying to share that. This is not a shop talk, this is for you to understand the difficulty that we have and that we are trying our best to improve intelligence gathering. What we had to do in the next few months while we got into government, was to challenge the intelligence forces to go back to criminal intelligence and left the damn political thing lone for a while.”
A.C.P., Allen Whylie, O.C., Eastern Division
“The Belize Police Department will be actively seeking to obtain all outstanding commitment warrants from the courts for their execution especially in respect to person convicted of street crimes. For example, robberies, theft, thefts from the persons, possession of illegal firearms and crimes of violence.”
Crispin Jeffries, Assistant Commissioner of Police
“The usual patrols will be increased in Belize City as well as across the country. Already the Belize Defence Force and the police have stepped up presence in the Cayo District as well as San Pedro. We are moving south and we are moving north as the weeks go on. At this time the focus is on Belize City. We will be doing an exercise as a part of the cycle breaker operation to ensure that person or persons who have legal firearms are in fact randomly checked to ensure that they have those firearms that they have been licensed to hold and not lending it out as the intelligence is indicating. We have been looking at reducing the availability of drugs among our young persons. It is a known fact that drug dealers are now trying to control turfs. The recent incidents of crime can attributed to some participation of drug dealers as well as street sellers.”
A.C.P. Whylie says while the Department tries to bear down on crime, they will carry out planned shut-downs of some administrative areas.
