Police Commissioner Seeks Tougher Measures to Combat Gang Membership in Belize

While the government continues to work with reformed gang members to curb crime, the Commissioner of Police Chester Williams says there is a need to crack down on active gang members. For years, the department has been charging persons with the crime of “being a member of a gang”, but the efforts have seen little to no real results. Many of the accused gangsters often plead guilty and pay a measly fine for the offense, which they cannot be charged for again. It’s an issue that Williams says he is aware of and is actively looking into how it can be addressed. 

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police: “The threshold is high and we are looking to see what can be done to amend the law. Not to make it easy, but for the prosecution to be able to prove more easily that these persons are gang members. Even you in a society without any legal training, you can see certain people operating and you can know that they are a gang, right? But the legal requirements are extremely high. Certainly when we do charge for that, it’s not a holding charge. We charge because we believe we have the evidence that these people are gang members and we will go to court with those, whatever evidence we have, and try our best through those evidence to demonstrate to the court that these people are gang members. We are looking at cases in the Caribbean like Jamaica. They have had a number of these cases ventilated through the court system. So we’re looking at those cases to see if we will be able to use them to make our cases stronger in terms of demonstrating to the court that the activities of these people could only lead to one conclusion that they are a criminal gang. So we continue to work on that.”

Last year, over a hundred alleged gang members were rounded up and sent to prison under a State of Emergency for ninety days.