And while these female entrepreneurs were busy learning how to better their business with GRIT, 34 Community Police officers were engaged in a 3 day gender based violence training, facilitated by the Family support and Gender Affairs department. The training serves as a guide to these officers on how to effectively perform their duties when responding to sensitive crimes. Here's how that training went today.
Cynthia Williams, Human Development Coordinator, Gender Unit
"We are partnering with the Belize police department to hold a 3 day workshop with police officers from the community policing unit as an effort to enhance the information and skills of engagement with the community and so these 3 days sessions are focusing on providing an awareness and a deeper understanding on issues related to gender, gender based violence and in particular domestic violence. We usually partner with the Belize police department every time we are able to this has been happening across the years we also provide these types of sensitization sessions at the recruit level whenever they are during their 6 month training and whenever they feel that it is time to be able to kind of refresh these ideas and emotions of the police officers especially because you have constant movement of police officers in different areas in different districts from units and so while they may have received some of it at the beginning of their recruit training often there are changes for example in the programming areas in the type of services that are delivered and so we always look at ways and avenues of how to keep them informed and more prepared to deal with the engagement community which is the main roles of the Community policing department unit."
Howell Gillett, Commander of National Community Policing Unit
"We wanted them to come in a setting with the experts so that they can learn more and deliver a better understanding of what they have learnt. Our officers had some misconceptions about gender based, and we are glad for this training I believe that has gone away now but it is, we don't want to stay just in the schools because you know the schools is just for younger persons which is more strategic and more long term so we want our officers to impart what they have learned here in the community settings for adults so that we see less of what we are seeing in the communities that we serve so it is so important for us to get all officers and there is more to it we want other officers to come so another training is scheduled for the new year for other officers to come and learn what was taught here and then there will be a follow up because I was told by the experts that you cannot learn everything just by the workshop you have to apply it and then come back and there is a separate training for that and our officers will be here for a second round and then we will have new officers come in until we cover all officers across the country, but it is not just for community policing we want all officers to be trained in this because gender based violence affects a great majority of our community and we want to do something to prevent the occurrence of crime and to save lives."
