Before the break you saw that old house that withstood the hurricane, and so did the police officers - for as long as they could. The Commissioner of Police explained that cops were out patrolling until the very last second before the hurricane, and as soon as it was safe to go back out, they were ensuring that thieves weren't targeting vulnerable homes.
And while they might have deterred some burglars, there wasn't much they could do about the zinc thieves.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"As you would know that with every disaster the police do have a role to play and yes we know NEMO was leading the charge in terms of the different activities the public officers, manning of hurricane shelters, dealing with search and rescue but the police as usual, we had to ensure that we put in place patrols to patrol the streets of this country until the very last hour that the storm would hit. that was exactly what we did. After the storm was over, even before NEMO gave the all clear, the police were out on the streets making sure that we maintain presence to avoid those persons who may have wanted to use the opportunity to go and burglarize places and so the police were out there immediately after the storm. To some extent we also assisted in cleaning or clearing the streets, and making sure that the highways and the streets in Belize City were usable so there was a lot that we did before and after the storm, as you know during the storm the police have to take shelter like any ordinary person, we don't want our personnel to be hurt stupidly and so we took shelter while the storm passed and immediately thereafter then we were out again making sure that we did what needed to be done to keep the country safe."
Reporter:
"Did you have very many cases of looting?"
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"No we don't have much cases of looting, we do have a few cases of burglary but it's not at an alarming rate I must say and again that has a lot to do that the police maintained our presence on the streets at the very last and again were the first to be back on the streets after the storm was over so that helped tremendously in minimizing the amount of burglaries."
"We do have a number of complaints about zinc or roofs being missing, several people lost their roof, I don't know how you could determine which roof is yours, again that seems to be an issue. You would see someone walking with zinc, he'll say my roof went, that's his zinc so it's extremely hard to tell which roof is from which building, after all the zincs all look alike."
