This afternoon at the Radisson, 36 police officers finished a 5-day training workshop on mediation and conflict resolution. They were being trained by professionals from Riverdale Mediation, a well-respected firm from Toronto, Canada.
The training is a continuation of the Canadian Government-funded program known as the Improved Access to Justice in the Caribbean, or IMPACT Justice for short. These 36 officers are the first cohort of police trained in alternative dispute resolution. They're being asked to use mediation as a policing tool, instead of the hard knocks approach of simply bringing criminal charges against accused persons.
Today, at the closing ceremony, one of the lead facilitators shared with us what the officers learned in their last 40 hours of instruction. Here's what she told us:
Hilary Linton - President, Riverdale Mediation
"The intended purpose is to equip the officers with skills to help them handle conflict more efficiently more effectively within their work and communities. So, we took them to 5 days of very intensive training. We taught them how to understand conflict, how to understand what's driving conflict, how to help people feel comfortable, resolving conflict together, we taught them negotiation skills. We taught them mediation skills and we taught them how to conclude settlements with people in a fair and useful way."
Daniel Ortiz, 7News
"Is this the formal structure? These mediators, I know are certified. What does the certification say and what does it allow them to do?"
Hilary Linton - President, Riverdale Mediation
"They have been provided with a well known internationally set of skills, set of values, set of principles, so that these officers now are representing a way of evolving conflict that is internationally recognized."
Sr. Supt. Bart Jones - Legal Advisor, Police Dept.
"Every day we deal with conflict, if it is when we are in the store, we negotiate prices. We go to the store, the shop keeper says the tennis cost a hundred dollars. We try to negotiate. So, you see that we have been doing conflict negotiations in our everyday life. Now we are certified in doing it a formalized way. Some people say a soft kind of policing but it is not. It is the change that we must adopt as we go into this new era. We have seen that the traditional policing has created by itself additional conflicts. So we employ you to use this knowledge as you go back into your respective communities. Up in the north, you will be called upon, maybe to deal with conflicts with the cane farmers, neighbors having fire spreading from one cane field to the other, creates conflict and throughout Belize there will be some conflicts that we can mediate. There are times when there may be minor offences committed by persons and sometimes we charge and even after someone has been charged or convicted there still remains that conflict, that animosity between neighbors because they still have to live in the same community. So mediation is an avenue for which we believe that can help to resolve conflicts and further deescalate situations within the community in which we serve."
The Officers are expected to get their training certificates early next month. IMPACT Justice has already facilitated mediation training in Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In October, IMPACT Justice facilitators were in Belize conducting training for rehabilitation for criminals, both juvenile and adult.
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