7 News Belize

Police And Youths: Finding Middle Ground
posted (March 5, 2012)
When police officers are patrolling the streets of Belize City, most of their first interactions with the public begins and ends with the youths they encounter.

The relationship between youths and police is one that is rife with distrust and controversy, so it's very rare when these two groups actually cooperate with each other.

This was exactly the type of relationship that Restore Belize and its partners tried to foster by implementing a program in Belize that has its roots in the US.

It is called the Youth and Police Initiative, and it is funded by the US Embassy.

The initiation of the program here in Belize was done last week by a representative of the North American Family Institute, a US Human Services Organization.

Today, 7News spoke with the Director of Restore Belize, Mary Vasquez - about the program and the progress they made last week.

Mary Vasquez - Director, Restore Belize
"The Youth and Police Initiative is a very innovative way to forge a positive relationship between young people and the police on the street. The reason we saw the need for this initiative is because every day you hear about the stories of unfortunate conflict and negative interactions between the community and the police. We know that the police are trying to do a good job in challenging circumstances. We also know that the community needs and expects respect. The Youth and Police Initiative is specifically to work with young people and then get them to interact with police officers. And we chose specifically the police officers that are on the street - the beat officers - and get them to understand each other. We had 15 police officers participating, and we had 15 youth participating. The youth were chose from highschools as well as some youth that are not currently in highschool. The police came from different divisions. And the very thing exciting thing that happened there is that by the end of the week, you had police and youth sitting down, talking to each other, and then each of them had to tell us something about the other one. This is a first exercise; we have 2 more planned already, and subsequenty to that, we want to expand the program even more. The police department is very excited about this. They see the potentional for it because they also want to have much better relationships with the community."

Director of training for NAFI, Paul Lewis, spoke about the origins of the programme...

Paul Lewis - Director of Training, NAFI
"How the program actually came about is we had US Embassy working with Partners for Democratic Change out of Washington, and they actually had some conversations with Restore Belize, the leading human services agency in Belize, around trying to do some community police initiative work. The Youth Police Initiative is a program where we try to get young folks within cities to interact with police personel, who actually work in particular communities. And what we are trying to do is we are trying to build bridges; we're trying to build positive alliances. We trying to disengage folks from having stereotypes about police and youth, and we're really trying to humanize relationships. The interesting thing that we are doing here in Belize is we have the train the trainer program. We're actually training folks who represent the human services in Belize to be facilitators to sustain the Youth Police model. So we have 8 folks representing different agencies here in Belize, who will be part of that train the trainer team."

The stakeholders want to expand and implement the program to improve police and youth interactions across the nation.

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