The US Embassy and the Belize Police Department today celebrated the end of three training events, which ended in a graduation today. Two of the training sessions were instructor development courses in capacity building and defensive tactics, while the final training was students who were trained by the newly skilled instructors.
But the main reason for the training was to help police officers de escalate situations without the use of excessive force. Today the US Ambassador and the ComPol told us more.
Michelle Kwan, US Ambassador To Belize
"Citizen security is a major priority for the US Embassy and so to have the Denver Police Department as well here to help facilitate this training is very powerful. So now as you heard from the remarks that these trained police officers can instil the knowledge, the experience and tools that they need to help de-escalate some of the tough situations that they are in, because lets be real, police officers I said in my remarks are human beings, but when they have the tools that they need to be able to handle different situations, they will be able to revert back to the knowledge and experiences that they learned in these courses."
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"I must say we had two graduating cohort, one dealt with defensive tactic train the trainers, as well as some who were taught by those trainers who were trained. And then we have the instructors development course. You would know often times there has been information in the media of police using improper methods of how to detain and deal with suspects. And so what the defensive tactic did was to train police officers in different means or different methods which they can use to detain persons without causing injuries or harm to them and so we're grateful for that. What will be done herein after is that the trainers will now develop their respective training package and they will train the other officers in the areas where they're from. And then in respect to the instructor's development course, we do have a number of regional and lead training officers across the country so they have now been taught in terms of pedagogical skills which will help to enhance the way how they develop their courses and that will help to see how we can improve what we do as a department. One of the mantra for people out there is that the police need more training and with this we will be able to train more and more police officers because the trainers will also go back to the respective areas and train police officers in very key subject areas that we know training is lacking all with a view to ensure that we develop our officers."
And the Police Minister added to this saying that already the complaints of using excessive force have been decreasing.
Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs
"Thanks to CARSI and the United States Embassy and Ambassador Kwan, we had an excellent opportunity to receive training for our trainers at the police department and so our instructors are now better equipped in terms of classroom delivery of the message, the principles, the subjects, to the students and of course to disseminate these principles all across the department to our 2,000+ police officers and I am of course especially pleased to see that there was a defensive tactics course that was presented by the Denver Police Department, I think those courses go a long way certainly in enhancing our position and our beliefs, since we took over office, we recognize that there's a culture within the police department that needed to change, I am so happy to see that that is already bearing fruit. As I've mentioned earlier, we've seen a drastic reduction to zero complains against the GI3 in 2022 and when you compared that to the GI3 complaints in 2020, and even before that, it was 19, I think the year before was 17 so completely wiping out the number of complaints against the specialized units is certainly a movement in a positive direction in restoring and rebuilding the confidence of the public in the police department."
We do not have access to police records to confirm this.