For decades the police department had to rely on eyewitness testimony in many of their cases - and we know that's not always reliable. But the department has been getting with the times and currently have over a 100 cameras strategically placed around the city, and along the John Smith Road, among other areas in the country. And today, they received fifty more. It's a collaboration between the Ministries of Home Affairs, Economic Development, and CABEI, and this afternoon, the system was officially launched.

Gisela Sanchez, President, CABEI
"This specific project regarding the cameras to improve the people's safety is part of a bigger program, a 3 million US dollar program to improve safety in general. This specific component is basically collaboration to provide more than 200 cameras in specific places within the city to improve the safety of the people so people can feel safer, people can feel with more peace to do whatever, they want, study, work, everything, and on top of that we are planning to provide in the next few months a 911 system, mechanism, again, to improve safety. One important thing about the cameras is that these are the first one connected through fibre optics so it's going to be state of the art technology provided for the people of Belize, very happy to be part of this."

Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs
"We had already I believe 150 cameras that we were already using. Overtime, we've managed to increase the number of cameras in Belize City along the John Smith Road and in San Pedro Town and this 50 camera donation from CABEI is something that has been a long time coming, as you know it requires a lot of paperwork so we're extremely grateful to Madam President Maroto, her team at CABEI, and the integral security program as well as the Ministry of Economic Development for making this additional fifty camera contribution a reality and now added to the 150, that takes us to above, because I think it is more than 150 we had, so I think it's somewhere around 222 cameras that we now have in place."

" We've already been seeing a trend in cases that are now coming before the courts, we're now seeing a trend of convictions, again we have to emphasize that in some instances when we do not have the third eye, the camera footage, and we rely exclusively on eyewitness footage, it does become an issue, those are the very challenging cases, we don't see that as prevalent in other parts of the country, we're able to get convictions in other parts of the country but for some reason, when it comes to Belize City it is difficult, but at the same time, you can expect to see greater convictions as a result of these additional cameras that are now in places that were not covered before."

The entire Integral Security Program, which this project falls under, is valued at 30 million US dollars.