And while the police have allowed protests, they drew the line at tyre fires on the highway. But, the police's permissive attitude to protests so far, hasn't won them any fans.
The public is calling for police reform and the PM also agreed that it is needed. Like the Special Envoy, Briceno conceded that there is little trust between the public and the police - and - as a possible hope - he turned to the well worn cliche of moving towards community policing:
Hon. John Briceno, Prime Minister
"The police do a lot of good work, but it only requires one slip for people to say oh the police are bad, they are corrupt, they are not properly trained, they don't think, they don't have common sense. But there are a lot of good police officers. Just like how there are good police officers, there are also bad cops and those are the ones that we have to go after and try to see how we could weed them out of the system. That by itself is not enough. You use the word reform and I do agree with you that we need to look at reform and that is one of the things that Minister Musa has been talking about that we have to reform the police."
"The Commissioner of Police must be commended, he was one of the first that did not mince words when he found out about the senseless death of Laddie. He went against the police. Usually, you hear that the police try to defend one another. Well, in this case the commissioner of police said that it was wrong and that person must be held responsible for his reckless behavior. That in itself can start to show some signs to the public that we should not lose complete trust in the police and that there has to be reforms, we must make reforms and I am looking for in the future that we can come up with something different whereby we can depend more on community policing as opposed to police of abuse and misuse of force. The police to be successful has to be able to have some kind of relationship with the community. If the police do not have the relationship with the community, they can't succeed, they can't do it alone. That is why we have said in PlanBelize that the kind of policing that we want to have or to institute is more community policing whereby the police is working within the community and becomes a part of the community and where people can have the confidence and trust to be able to work with them."
