7 News Belize

The Difficulty of Gang Legislation
posted (January 2, 2025)
Untitled Document

And while the LIU works with gang communities, the police do too - except when they are trying to incarcerate them for gang membership.

The crime of being a member of a gang has never quite worked as well as police would wish it to. Alleged gangsters who have pleaded guilty get off with a fine, and then cannot be charged again for the same crime.

And even for police to prove they are gang members is difficult, because it's not like gangs have registration drives.

On Tuesday, the Compol spoke about his frustratIon:

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"It is certainly a difficult task Marisol the threshold is high and we are looking to see what can be done to amend the law to not to make it easy easy but for the prosecution to be able to prove more easily that these persons are gang members even you in society without any legal training can see certain people operating and you can know that they are a gang but the legal requirements is extremely high. Certainly when we do charge for that it's not a holding charge because we believe that we have the evidence that these people are gang members. And we will go to court with those, whatever evidence we have and try our best through those evidence to demonstrate to the court that these people are gang members. We are looking at cases in the Caribbean like Jamaica had a number of these cases ventilated through the court system so we are looking at those cases to see if we will be able to use them to make our cases stronger in term of demonstrating to the court that the activities of these people can only lead to one conclusion that they are a criminal gang. And we will continue to work at that."

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