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And while the commissioner didn't want to touch that one - he was happy to talk about the sharp downward trend in the murder rate. If the trend holds for the last 10 days of the years, police are on track to record the fewest number of murders in 18 years, and the lowest murder rate literally since the turn of the century!
There are many factors that have contributed to making this a reality - including enhanced policing, effective mediation, and, yes, migration.
Today he discussed what would be a historic accomplishment:
Chester Williams, Commissioner of police
"Well I feel good i must say that from the time i was appointed commissioner of police it had always been my hope to see if we can reduce the murders to under 100 and while we came very close in terms of going a bit north of 100 we were never able to keep the figures south of 100 and so for the first time in my five years tenure as commissioner and the first time since 2013 we are seeing the figures south of 100 but most importantly about this years figure it is historic in the sense that it is the lowest we have seen since 2006 and like you said the per capita figure is going to be the lowest like you said again 2005 which i believe is a great success for the police department but i must give kudos to our minister Mr Musa he have always been supportive of us, whenever we request for resources he is always there along with the prime minister I know that we are in severe financial constraints but the prime minister does find a way to give the police the resources that we need to function, its not all that we want we get but he tries his best to give us as much as he can. And then we have the all of government approach where we incorporate the other stakeholders, the human development the ministry of youth and sports ministry of education with the free education campaign on southside belize city we are seeing more and more young people enrolled in schools which is taking them off the streets. All of these things are playing into what we are now reaping the benefit of a low crime rate where murders are concerned so going into 2024 we are optimistic that while we believe that it is going to be extremely hard to replicate what we have done this year we do believe that we will be able to replicate it or do even better. At the end of the day the men and women of the department are extremely dedicated, they are resilient and whenever challenges present themselves we find a way to overcome those challenges and move on in the best way we can."
