7 News Belize

Take ‘Em to Church, Chester!
posted (May 7, 2018)
Love them or hate them, the Gang Suppression Unit doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

For residents living in gang infested neighborhoods, they're viewed with deep suspicion and distrust, but some sectors of society, see them as the necessary hard buffer between the lawful and the lawless.

For the police, they are a disciplined unit which performs. And, the police top brass displayed their support for the unit, yesterday, when they accompanied members of the controversial unit to a church service at Wesley on Albert Street.

The Deputy Police Commissioner spoke about it today:

Chester Williams- Deputy Commissioner of Police
"For us, policing cannot be done without God. God must be in everything that we do. We are God fearing individuals, so myself and Mr. Mariano decided that we would organize a church service and we would take the police officers to church. And we know that the GSU has always been a controversial unit where the public is concerned. And so, we wanted the members of the public to see that the members of Gang Suppression Unit are humans too and they are also God fearing. They were taken to church and participated like any ordinary person. The church service was excellent, I must say. Reverend Goff, did an exceedingly good job in outlining the roles and functions of the police and dove tailed that into the spiritual aspect of it. So, I want to thank those who made the church service possible and we are hoping that we will be able to go back very soon again to have another service. Our hope is that we can attend church service with our officers every three weeks and so that is what we will be doing as of now."





A Novel Way To Approach Conflict Resolution

So, while the department shows unity with one of it's notorious units, they also want to play nice with the civil society organizations who want to lend a helping hand to address the problem of crime.

It's on everyone's mind, and as we told you, it needs to be curbed as soon as possible before 2018 becomes the bloodiest year on record in Belize.

Today, at the bi-weekly police press conference, the Eastern Regional Commander told us that he has set up a new Conflict Resolution Office at the Raccoon Street Police Station. Here's how he explained how it will work, and what it hopes to achieve:

ACP Robert Mariano - OC, Belize Eastern Division
"Since I have taken over command of Easter Police Division I noticed that there have been several tensions with the different groups here within Belize City. And in order to diffuse the tension with the different rival groups and also to work with the different organizations that have offered assistance to the Belize Police Department, we have since set up a new office at the Raccoon Street Police Station and this office is known as the conflict resolution office. This office will work to deal with intervention and mediation. It will also work in conjunction with CYDP, and they will be dealing specifically to coordinate all mediation and intervention directly from my office. I believe that working with the different groups or to mediate with the different groups will help us diffuse a lot of tensions. So, that is one of the main issues I intend to work on in the next few weeks. Again, we will be starting as early as tomorrow. We'll be having a meeting at my office with the different stakeholders. We have had meetings with the Evangelical Associations, we had meetings with the different unions and all of them have offered help. So, I believe that it is important for us to form an office which will act as the secretariat to take up the offers from the different organizations."



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