Police work and missionary work don't usually go together. Sure, the main focus for both is to serve and help people - just in different ways. But now the police department and several church groups will join together in finding a way to make city streets safe. After the Mayflower flare-up, police had to come up with a number of peace measures to defuse the situation, one of them being to engage the religious community. Today the group met at the Yabra Community Center to map a way forward. Deputy Commissioner of Police Chester Williams and Senator of Churches Ashley Rocke told us more about their joint plan.
DCP Chester Williams, Commander of Operations
"We were able to meet with majority of the church leaders from across Belize to see how we can solicit the churches support in the fight against crime. As we know crime is not something that can be fought from the police point of view but we must have a multi-faceted approach in the endeavor to fight against crime."
"We had a healthy discussion in terms of looking at what it is the police have been doing and we get input from the church to see how we can improve on what we have been doing and the churches also gave us some new ideas that we can filter into our daily operational procedures to be able to make the situation better. We came up with some agreements that we will be ensuring moving forward, one such an agreement is that we are agreeing to have a youth empowerment summit, where we will be inviting youth from the entire city especially from these gang ridden neighborhoods to Birds Isle and we want to have an all day summit or an empowerment summit with them."
"We are looking at how we the police can improve ourselves in terms of minimizing the occurrences of police brutality. We are looking at the churches going into the different gang neighborhoods like when we do meet and greet the churches will go with us and they will try to minister to these young men in their respective communities, hopefully with that after a period of time, the young men will feel more free to come into the church."
"The churches have also agreed to offer counseling services as well as chaplain services to the police. They have also agreed to be a part of our youth mentorship program in providing spirituality training for the youths we intend to mentor."
Courtney Weatherburne, reporter
"How confident are you and the team that you will get through to these youth and the wider community."
DCP Chester Williams
"Well I am very much confident like I always said as bad as a person may be that person do have good in them and these young men in my constant dialogue with them I know for a fact that they do have good in them and they are also good listeners. The only thing we have to be careful how we approach them and we have to try to appeal to their emotions, to their weakness and once we can do that we will be able to reach out to them."
Ashley Rocke, Senator of Churches
"We felt that it was a good initiative, the church obviously has a disconnect when it comes to us and gangs and in my mind if there is a group of people who have worked with the gangs successfully it is the police force and so partnering with them to bring this to fruition is something."
The Council of churches, the Evangelical Association and the Red Cross were present at the meeting. Another follow up meeting will be held on May 15th.
Email
Print