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COMPOL Says CWU Has Rights To Feel Betrayed
posted (July 22, 2020)
And this evening at 5:00, the Commissioner of Police called an emergency press briefing to say much along the line of his minister. By then he had already had a debriefing with the GSU to try and find out the answer to that burning question: who gave the order?

This evening he told the press that the incident has undermined his credibility, with the CWU which whose members, he says, were well within their rights to believe that he set them up.

Chester Williams- Commissioner of Police
"The Port of Belize wanted the police to move the people off the compound. So, I said to the commander of Eastern Division, my position is that once these people are on the compound and they are peaceful, then let us allow them to express themselves peacefully. They will not stay there all day, they have to go home. After I gave that directive to the commander I also communicated with Mr. Hyde who is the president of the CWU and I told him that we were going to allow them to remain on the grounds providing that they remain peaceful. He gave his assurance that they were not about trouble that they were going to be peaceful. A few minutes later, I got a call that shots were being fired at the Port of Belize Limited and that the GSU were deployed to the area. Now for me that was a total wrong move. When we have people who are agitated, especially who know that they are in the process of losing their livelihood, we would expect that the police would do the utmost best to ensure that whatever we do would not be such that would cause more agitation. So, in a situation as volatile as what was happening at Port, I would have never made a decision to deploy a paramilitary unit because their mere presence would have made those agitated people believe that: you know what, here is the state enforcing their might on us. And it would cause them to become more agitated. When recieved that call, I called the OC in Eastern Division and I directed that the GSU be removed immediately. Mr. Dawson assured me that he was going on the grounds to ensure that the GSU were removed. But by that time the damage was already done because persons were already shot with rubber bullets and people had become more agitated. Now I want the public to understand that as a police department, we must always strive to be professional, we must always strive to do things in a peaceful manner. Brute force and ignorance does not make situations better for us. I believe that if the ordinary uniform police officers had been left in the area with those who were protesting the crowd would not have become more agitated. But Mr. Dawson has given his explanation as to what transpired, I am looking at it and I have also asked the Union to have those persons who were shot to come in to make their complaint and we will address it swiftly. Certain elements from the GSU have been transferred because we need to send a strong signal that we are not gonna have our officers go out and use force that is unnecessary against people who are dissenting peacefully."

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