Commissioner of Police Returns from U.S. Law Enforcement Conference with New Crime-Fighting Insights

The Commissioner of Police Chester Williams recently returned from an international conference in the United States of America. Williams spent several days meeting with his global counters at an event held by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The event sought to bring together law enforcement agencies to share best practices in crime fighting and the use of technology in policing. Today, Williams spoke on the trip and how he was able to return with valuable knowledge that can be used in Belize. 

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police: “I attended the IACP, International Association of Chief of Police Conference in Boston Massachusetts. It was a good conference in terms of looking at best practices, looking at networking. There were a number of sessions that were held that I participated in. Where I can say there were many take backs that we can look at to be able to enhance the work that we do, one of the things that impressed me was the nature of the community policing work in Boston. Certainly it’s something that we can look at to see how we can enhance our community policing here. There is a program that they have which is similar to the LIU program that looks at crime form a root cause and I know that there are many people that believe that the government and the police are not looking at the root causes of crime to address crime but certainly we are doing that and that’s what LIU and the all of government approach is doing. But again it requires more than just government effort. One of the salient things that came out of that conference is that if we want to change the trajectory of crime we need to get the public participation, we need to get parents involved because many of the people who are involved in crime are people who would normally listen to their parents and parents can provide some sort of advice the way they are raised is important. If we raise our children in a way that they don’t respect police, they don’t respect the elders, they don’t respect nobody then certainly they’re going to become criminals when they grow. So it starts from home making sure that parenting works and then it goes into the school because when that fails then people become offender and they fall within the domain of the police.”

Williams returned to the country yesterday.