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We asked police about the very worrying implication that innocent people are being targeted. Here's what the Deputy Police Commissioner had to say:

Chester Williams - Deputy Commissioner of Police, Commander Operations
"While some may think that police effort should be able to avert any incident, we do not police the homes and the minds of people. When you have these murders that are not gang related, they are very difficult to predict. We have been putting our efforts in terms of looking at areas where we believe there might be gang retaliation as a result of incidents to prevent those incidents from occurring because those are more predictable. When it comes to those types of murders, like Mr. Guardado and Mr. Hajjara's murders, those are not easy to predict. We somewhat would want to believe that Mr. Hajjara's murder is a possible case of robbery that we are also looking at. And so yes, as a police department, we are concerned and we are looking at our operational strategies to see what can be done to minimize the occurrence of these types of incidents. And I can assure you, from a police stand point, we will do what we can do to be able to prevent these incidents from occurring but I also want to ask the general public to also play their part because at the end of the day, it is not an effort that the police alone must venture into but rather the public must play their part when it comes to preventing cases of robbery. Our advice would be that if anyone comes to rob you, surrender whatever it is that you have. Don't resist unless you believe you will have the upper hand. The situation is even worse when you see the culprit has a firearm. Give them whatever property they ask for and let us investigate to see if we can find those persons afterwards. We also try to impress upon business owners not to keep large sums of money within the establishment. Try to do your deposit at the banks as frequent as possible and keep as little cash as possible at your business establishment. We ask that they install security surveillance cameras. That can also serve as a deterrent because when the criminal comes to the store and sees surveillance footage, while it might not deter all, it will deter some of them from even wanting to go into the place and commit these types of crimes."

So, only 125 days have elapsed in 2018 - that just over one - third of the year and the murder total of 66 is already close to half of the 2017 total. If the killings continue at this pace, Belize would be on track to record close to 200 murders - which would be the worst kind of record to make.