Commissioner of Police Chester Williams has moved to dismiss a police corporal whose name was listed in a note found along with the body of missing man Raheem Usher.
Usher's body was found at the entrance to San Antonio Village on February 27th with a huge note containing the names of two police officers and four other persons, and linking them to narco trafficking.
The compol first wrote to this officer in early March and asked him to list reasons why he should not be dismissed from the department. His attorney Andrew Bennett wrote back and the Compol responded today saying he was not convinced.
His letter says. "In light of the serious nature of the allegations against you, the impact on the reputation of the Belize Police Department, and after careful consideration of the submission by your attorney...I hereby exercise my power and discharge you from the Belize Police Department, effective March 28, 2025. You may appeal this decision to the Belize Advisory Council within 21 days of receiving this letter of discharge." The officer had more than 21 years of service.
In a recent interview where he spoke generally about officers linked to the cartel, here's what the Commissioner said about his determination to purge them:
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"The Belize Police Department is not going to shield no police officer who gets entangled with cartels. If you get entangled with cartels the best I can do for you is to second you to Chetumal where you can work with them but I will not allow for police officers to be entangled with cartels and be working with other police officers who are not involved and when the cartel comes for them, they end up injuring innocent police officers, it is extremely risky and so I have said that what we need to do is to investigate, identify those police officers and I don't think transferring them is going to be helpful. If we transfer them, they move to other areas and they recruit more police officers so they will in essence be contaminating more police officers so my thing is that we identify them and we get rid of them. You can't be cartel and be police at the same time, you have to decide what you're going to be, you can only be one. So you either decide to be cartel or you decide to be police. The fact that they have decided to be cartels, there's no room for them to be police officers. We have to part ways and that's the bottom line."
The officer in this case can still make an appeal to the Belize Advisory Council. We stress that the Compol only referred in his letter to allegations against him.
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