We also asked the Commissioner for his assessment of crime trends for the first six months of this year as compared to last year.
According to the Belize Crime Observatory, January to June of 2022 has a similar number of murders when compared to the same time period last year.
But June is seeing an uptick in killings; last year at the end of June, there were 3 murders, and although June, 2022 is not yet finished, police already have to investigate twice that number.
Are violent crimes slowly trending up? Here's the Commissioner's assessment on that:
Chester Williams - Commissioner of Police
"You see, it takes sometimes, one incident to spike a number of incidents. For example, whenever we have a situation where a major gang figure is killed, that normally starts a chain of killings. Fortunately for us, this year, we have not seen that. We have been able to be on the grounds and do what needs to be done to stem the bleeding. And we're hoping that going forward; we will continue to do so. But again, we look at the month of June last year, I think the month of June last year had only four murders, and so I said to my command staff when the month began that it's certainly is going to be a difficult past for us to be able to defeat the month of June last year. It is next to impossible. Then we can look at the month of May. Last year when we had 21, I think, murders, I said to my command staff, I said, well, the month of May is a month that we can play catch up. If we can win the month of May by at least ten, we can cut down on the murder count for this year when compared to last year. And again, the good work of the police, we saw that the month of May this year we had only 8, compared to 21 last year. So, we reduction of 13. So that was able to take away from the increase we had this year and practically bring us at the end of May two below last year's figure. Then, when you enter the month of June, which had only four last year and I think, so far, this year we are at about seven. We are already above last year's figure. So, we see that we're back up again. The month of July last year had seven. Again, it is going to be a tough fight for us to defeat July last year. But when it got to August last year, where there were 16, then perhaps we can look at capitalizing in the month of August this year and try to see how we can level things off or bring it lower than last year's figure. So, it is something I monitor very closely because, as I have always said, my objective is always to reduce the number of murders. If we can save one life, it is one life saved. Every time we have a murder, there is a family that is left without a breadwinner, or a family that is left there grieving in pain that they do not deserve."
