And keeping it on the highways...
Throughout 2024, we reported on dozens of road fatalities - whether they were motorcycle accidents or vehicular ones. It has reached a crisis level, particularly after 10 persons were killed in a single accident in December.
And because of that, the police department is launching a Road Policing Unit. But this unit won't just be in charge of traffic violations. They'll also be dealing with cross border criminal activity and human smuggling. ComPol Williams told us more.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"We have next week Monday will be the official launch of the Road Policing Unit, the Road Policing Unit is a new unit that we're creating within the MIT and the Road Policing Unit is going to be tasked with policing our highways and byways. we'll see more checkpoints in strategic areas of the country mounted by these officers and their duties is going to include looking at Human Trafficking, Human Smuggling, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking as well as those transient criminals and cross border transnational organized crime. So they'll have a huge mandate in terms of making sure they secure our highways and with that will also come, they'll be issuing the traffic violations tickets so if they encounter any traffic violations they'll be able to issue tickets for those as well. And along with that, separate and apart from that, we will also have our traffic police officers across the country who are going to be working with the national transport or the local transport to ensure that they could conduct more checkpoints and highway patrols with a view to ensure that we reduce the amount of fatalities on our highways. So 2025 we intend to do a lot to mitigate the issues of Road Traffic Fatalities and we hope that the Belizean people work with us. Along with that we'll also be pushing for the amendments to the laws, I think that is going to be discussed by Cabinet very shortly to see to what extent they intend to take the amendment, particularly where drunk driving is concerned and once we get those amendments in, we have stricter penalties, we believe it is going to help as well to serve as a deterrent to those persons who drive under the influence and those persons who drive and violate the road traffic rules and violations."
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