They call it "proactive policing" but if you were young and black on the southside of Belize City last night, chances are the police were looking for you. Police confirm that yesterday evening more than one hundred young men from the southside of the city were rounded up and taken to the Queen Police Station. The police say the men were taken there to dialogue but the families say they were detained. It was situation ripe for a confrontation between the law and civilians and 7NEWS was there to capture it. Keith Swift has the story.
Woman #1,
"Lotta people come home from work and had to come here to look for their pickney, little pickney. That doesn't make sense because they have children and they wouldn't want nobody to do that to their pickney and if they did pickup them up, they would charge him and you would just hear about it one time and after that it would be pushed underneath the rug and I can tell anyone of them that because I don't business and they want to lock me up, tell them to bring it."
That was what it was like last night in front of the Queen Street Police Station: angry women standing outside the station because their sons, brothers, husbands, and boyfriends were locked up inside the station's canteen. These women say police swept the men off the streets on the south side before sunset and they came to the police station to find out why. Some like Anna Young who was heading to a PUP meeting when her boyfriend and brother were picked up………..again they left their house to head to Queen Street but not the police station - the PUP headquarters.
Ana Young,
"Miss Trujeque she is a PUP city councilor. She called me because she lives right beside us and she called and told me that we need to be at a meeting because she wanted us to work for her for first of March. Fine I told her okay and she told me to meet here six o'clock at the PUP meeting on Queen Street. Quarter to six me and my cousin and my boyfriend and my brother decided to come
to the meeting. As we stepped outside to go the PUP they ran out and they grabbed my boyfriend and my brother. They didn't have any reason for taking them."
Woman #1,
"Let me let you know something, they have my man, they have my two braleee and they can't give me any reason why and I want him out from in there. I am already tired of them. All the time they are pick up people and they didn't find anything on them so why are they locking them up."
Woman #2,
"The bad part is that they are picking up from 17 year old boys. My little brother is in there and then they don't want to give you any answer. hey don't want to give you any answer as to what they are doing or nothing like that."
Woman #1,
"That doesn't make sense because women are waiting for their man to come home and they are picking them up this kind of way and can't give you a good reason."
Woman #3,
"If they were doing their job they would know who to go pick up and who not to go pick up."
Woman #1,
"I am ready to go home. Their operation doesn't concern me, I don't care who they kill, that is their business. Good shouldn't suffer for the bad that is not supposed to happen."
And it wasn't only angry girlfriends. We saw worried mothers inside of the station trying to get information about their children who were detained but they too came out answer-less. Donna Augustus says her 18-year-old son was hauled off the basketball court where he was shooting hoops.
Donna Augustus,
"My son was playing basketball on the court and they came and told they wanted to have a meeting with them at the police station with the Prime Minister. They brought the pickney to the police station and the pickney have school in the morning. You don't have any rights on your own basketball court now? My son is 18 years old but he is going to school and he was playing basketball. Who they are to pick up they don't pick up. They want the public to work with them but they don't know how to work with the public."
Keith Swift,
Your son is in there and you don't know why?
Donna Augustus,
"I don't know. They came and took the ball away from them and put it down and told them to come to the station because they are having a meeting. And a next young man was there and they let him go because his father is mister so and so and he came for his son and they let him go. I have no idea why they picked him up because he plays ball. He doesn't have any kind of contact with those policemen none at all."
Keith Swift,
Is he a trouble maker?
Donna Augustus,
"Of course not. My son has never been a this police station before until they picked him up tonight."
It would be another half hour before these women got any information. They were summoned inside the station compound for a meeting. They went upstairs where they were reportedly briefed by Eastern Division boss and Assistant Commissioner of Police Crispin Jeffries Sr. We followed but were eventually kicked out. But the story they were told, and the one we got today from press officer G. Michael Reid, was this:
G. Michael Reid, Police Press Officer
"Nobody was locked up in the cellblock as such. This was a environment, a peaceful environment, where the folks were being spoken to and asked to dialogue among themselves to try to come up to a solution."
Keith Swift,
But these guys and their parents were telling us that they were being held against their will, they were detained.
G. Michael Reid,
"Its not detained, that's not a good word. Certainly we have from time to time done this and have asked these individuals to come. And when they are asked willingly, it's a difficultly to get them here."
Keith Swift,
What was the criteria, any young black male on the street?
G. Michael Reid,
"No. There were certain areas where we believe, and intelligence has led us to know, that there are disagreements between certain persons on the street. Some of these disagreements go back a away and some are recent. This is just an attempt to be proactive and try to nip something in the bud before it gets out of hand."
The explanation seemed plausible to some, but after waiting for three to four hours - there were mixed feelings.
Ana Young,
"I still noh happy because then I have to stay right here waiting for my boyfriend and my brother when we could have been home right now with our four month old child. And he asked me what is my boy's name and I am not ashamed to give him because he could go look up from 1900 and he won't find nothing on my boy because my boy has never yet had an interaction with those people."
Woman #2,
"I came out because they have two brothers but according to what mister man was telling us, I understand it."
But it was clear the explanation didn't work for the crowd and now it seems again there is a widening rift between those inside the police station and those on the outside.
Police say none of the men detained spent the night in police custody or were charged.
