Today, the second Cohort of Officers enrolled in the PEACE Program, a collaboration between the Belize Police Department and the US Embassy, received their certificates of completion.
The initiative was launched in November of 2023, and now these officers are fully equipped with the skills to be agents of intervention and change - teaching children about the dangers of bullying and gang related activities. Here's what the Compol said about it at the ceremony today at the Training Academy in Belmopan.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"We are here today as we celebrate the culmination of a peace training. The peace as you would know is the positive engagement and Civic Education program which we had implemented following the great program becoming obsolete. What we did then was to put together a Cohort of police officers from across the country led by Dr Priscilla Brown and Mr Howell Gillet and they embarked on putting together the manual for the Peace program following that last year we had the piloting of the program in Belize City and then now we are now expanding on that program. The expansion require that we had to train more police officers and instructors to go into the classroom and instruct on the content of the peace program and so we are graduating 34 officers today and those officers are from across the country and their task will be to ensure that they go to the classroom as we now expand the program across the country and we expect that they are going to instruct the students on the content of this program and again it's apart of our community policing programs. You would know that we are currently embarking more aggressively on the importance of community policing and if it is that we want to break the cycle of gangs we have to start with our children who are in that primary school age making sure that we raise the tree the right way is important because if we neglect the tree and the tree bends it's going to be difficult to straighten that tree so we are here to go into the classroom, work with teachers and work with parents to make sure that we get our young people to walk that straight line teaching them life skills and other programs that is going to help them become better decision makers and they grow into life."
