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For the last two days, we've been showing you how this year's Exercise Tradewinds has been going. Our stories, so far, have featured the BDF and the Coast Guard, and today, we got an opportunity to see how police units from all across the Caribbean were training together and sharing their professional knowledge.

That happened at the National Police Training Academy in Belmopan, and Our News team was there. Daniel Ortiz reports:

This afternoon, our news team found civilian and military lawmen from the participating nations in different training scenarios all over the National Police Training Academy compound.

Chester Williams - Commissioner of Police
"During the past few days, we have had many interactions with police and military personnel from across the region, as well as from the United States and Mexico. And while, yes, Tradewinds may appear to be a military exercise, it does have a law enforcement component. And based on that, we were able to benefit from a number of courses offered during this time."

Kevin Bostick - Director of Exercises and Coalition Affairs, US SouthCom.
"It's predominately police, but as always, you know, the way we train, when the police need the help from the military, the military needs to understand how to do public order and discipline. The military needs to understand how to do non-lethal organizational capabilities and weapons of self-defense but also doing those non-lethal measures to help the police in riot control or anything that may need to be supported. We have something that we call defense support to civil authorities. And in that realm, that's where we turn around, and if they call us for help in the cities, in the states, and a country or whatever, that may normally be a police mission. The military can support that police mission and be a support, not necessarily being the lead, but support with people, the equipment, and just helping get after what they're trying to do in accomplishing their goals."

All of the scenarios involved highly contentious or stressful situations. The officers were practicing how to protect their lives and the lives of their colleagues while making intelligent decisions in the heat of the moment that involved lethal use of force.

In one exercise, law enforcement teams had to pursue a group of armed criminals in a vehicle, and the interdiction effort escalated to a hostile exchange of gunfire. One of the armed assailants in this simulation was shot and killed.

Then, the other exercises involved highly trained tactical teams who had to breech the property of organized criminals who intended to fight to the death, resisting the law.

And finally, the lawmen had to practice how best to suppress a violent riot that escalated all the way to the point in which civilians were lobbing Molotov cocktails at the riot squad.

According to Commissioner Williams, this training should benefit the region's police officers and military personnel, who must be ready to respond to any forms of civil unrest or dangerous interdiction efforts.

Chester Williams
"Some of the courses that we benefited from are house clearing and searching of vehicles, intelligence gathering, and public order training. And these pieces of training, as you would know, are and will be very important for us as a law enforcement organization. As you would know, we do have issues at times as it relates to gangs, cross-border and other activities that do require us to be able to gather good intelligence. And then, as it relates to house clearing and stopping on searching of vehicles, those are things that the police do on a daily basis. And so, to have benefited from this training certainly will enhance our officer's ability to know exactly how to search a household, to search a vehicle, what to look for and how to neutralize any threat that may arise during such activity. And then public order, you know, we live in a society that from time to time, people do dissent, and they do have a right to dissent."

Daniel Ortiz
"That dissent sometimes devolves into riots."

Chester Williams
"Yes, if you look at the last time we had an incident in Belize City at Port of Belize, the way it was dealt with by the police was certainly not the appropriate way as we would want it to have been dealt with. And so I believe that having undergone the public order training over the past two weeks, it certainly will help our officers, giving them a better insight in terms of how they will approach any such situation should it arise again. While, yes, we do have riots at times, we still cannot expect that we will just move in, and because we have the might of the state behind us, we can just do as we want. We must always try to find a couple of ways to diffuse any relative situation. And so I am I'm grateful for the training, and I'm hopeful that the officers have learned a lot from it. What we will do is to ensure we have what is called train the trainers. Those officers who partook in training will now be able to train the other officers in the respective areas where they work. Certainly, the officer must always have in the forefront of his or her thinking their own personal safety and the safety of their colleagues. That must be at the forefront. And then, with that, you must also have to ensure you protect the innocent bystanders, those civilians who are not a part of what may be taking place. We have also to protect them. Then, we also have to look at protecting property. Those are things that we must do. And even those who may be dissenting and are charging at the police, we still have to ensure that when we deal with them, we deal with them in such a way that is justified by law."