And while the protests caused chaos for commuters, the police were out in full force maintaining order with the protesters. The teachers, though, were peaceful, which worked in the police's favor since the last time they dealt with a large group of protesters was at the Port of Belize and that… didn't end well.
That's why in this case, Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams, instructed his officers to keep the calm, but don't engage unless absolutely necessary.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"This morning at different times we had blockage of the highways across the country by the joint unions, particularly of the BNTU and PSU. The blockage did cause some inconvenience to some motorists particularly commuters who traverse the highway to go to work ever morning. And from a policing standpoint, our approach was to avoid any confrontation with the unions. We have seen in the past where the police have intervene in these activities and it just caused confrontation and then things get out of control, resulting in the injury of persons or the damage of properties and we wanted to avert that this morning so my instructions to my officers was to ensure we exercised great restraint. We would have done all we could to avert the blockage but in circumstances where the blockage had occurred, then we would not any degree of force to move them, instead what we would do was to maintain our presence to maintain law and order and allow the teachers or the joint union to have their fifteen minutes of fame and as soon as the fifteen minutes were over they would unblock the road and we would go about their merry way."
"We do understand the fact that the joint union have a week of activities that they would be embarking on. And I have said to the officers that we would avoid confrontation at every cost but we are going to ensure that we police the events to the best of our ability with a view to ensure that law and order is maintained that there is no injury to person or damage to properties. Historically, the teachers have been peaceful as well as the PSU and so we don't anticipate that they're going to do anything that is going to put our country in a more dire financial position as we currently are. I believe they are responsible enough to ensure that whatever is done, Is done within the limits of the law and at the same time to do not cause the government to incur further expenses to repair further damage`s that came about as a result of their protests."
"Yes it is going to put strain on our resources, we have to police the event, and at the end of the day it is not something we can ignore. We have our usual policing efforts we must do and now we have additional activities to police so yes it's going to put strain on our resources but at the end of the day it's something we must do."
The officers ensured that traffic went back to normal after exactly fifteen minutes of the blockage on the highways.
