ComPol Williams Says Officers Used Excessive Force

The Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams, says the officers involved in the shooting death of 19-year-old Dyandre Chee used excessive force and may have lied. The officers claim to have opened fire on the teen after hearing the sounds of gunshots, but Chee’s friend, Yahari Villeda, who was one of the motorcyclists along with him, says the noise came from their motorcycles. The claim is one that, according to Williams, was backed up by an auto mechanic who inspected the motorcycles today and confirmed Villeda’s claim as being a possibility. Here’s how the ComPol explained the police’s notion of what transpired between Chee and the officers, who remain in detention.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police: “We are operating under the perception that it could be that as the young men have said that the motorcycle that they were on have the muffler removed and because of the removal of the muffler it makes a lot of noise when you gear down it will make a backfire sound and as a part of the investigation I had directed this morning that Mr.Jones take the motorcycle to a mechanic to verify if in fact the motorcycles would be capable of making such noise. That was done and the mechanic does confirm that the motorcycles in fact makes those noises. So we’re still in limbo where that is concerned. My thing is that from what I have seen through the investigation is that the force used by the police officers in that particular incident was excessive and it ought not to have occurred. As said by Mr.Hernandez we do have a pursuit policy and the pursuit policy is clear. I can tell you for the first time in the history of the police department we have  partnership with the Human Rights Commission and we even went to the extent of creating some very nice human rights booklets that we issue to police officers. We went even further to make sure that the legal unit within our department gone around the country and ensure that they train police officers in the human rights policy, the pursuit policy and the use of force policy because these are policies that we know are very essential to the performance of police officers out on the streets and so any breach of those policies by members of the department must be taken very seriously especially when the outcome is what we saw in Orange Walk on Saturday night. So Mr.Hernandez is putting together his report from the compliance standpoint and his report with the findings will be submitted to the Professional Standards Branch.”

ComPol Williams added that as soon as the DPP has given directives for charges to be levied against the officer, their identities will be released to the public.