If you follow the hit Showtime series Homeland or the popular American cop shows like "Quantico," you get an idea of what it takes to be an FBI or a CIA agent. And while Belize is a long way from that kind of surveillance state, collecting intelligence is a major part of crime fighting in Belize. That was the objective of the Basic Intelligence Police Training course. A closing ceremony was held this morning at the Biltmore and the participants told us how they will incorporate what they learned into police investigations.
Bob Gibson, Coordinator
"This is intended to improve the student's abilities to analyze the facts that are gathering from their community, whether it be nationwide or whether it be in a community or district. The idea is that you collect information, you analyze it. Not just how you think about it, but an exact process of how you go about analyzing this and how you use that information to not just respond to crime, but you also want to do it to divert crime and to stop crime from happening. So you have to think broadly, not just simply tactically like a military kind of operation or just simply a police operation."
Courtney Weatherburne
"What is your reaction from the police officers? How have they been doing?"
Bob Gibson, Coordinator
"I was just talking to them just now as a group and their reaction is really very good. They seem to be very responsive to the FBI instructors that we have here and they were telling us that basically it's not like they weren't doing any of this, they are already doing some of it. But they didn't appreciate what they were doing and they didn't know how to formulize that process. So they are formalizing the process doing it as an organized process and are just being more effective by putting it in this context. We've come a long way over the past several years. If you go and look at the academy now, you look at the scenes of crime, you look at all these different areas, they have been a great improvement. But nonetheless there are great improvements that need to come. We come a long way and we have a long way to go. If that make sense. But the attitude and the focus of everybody to improve is amazing. That's not what you have in every country you go to. Here, people are really excited and motivated to learn and change and to improve the police processing and not just the police. We are talking about the justice process overall. You can't focus just on only one area, you have to focus on the whole system."
Dereck Stivers, Intelligence Analyst, FBI
"We've covered a wide range of topics this week. Intelligence analysis is all about trying to predict what threat might be coming next. So we try to take a look at historical data and what is currently going on and try to predict the next threat so that we can prevent it from happening in the first place."
Cpl. Jane Usher, Police Department
"We learn a lot of structural analytical techniques that will help us to do better predictive analysis. I think something that I am definitely going to take home from this course is giving in report form to our commanders, not only what is happening, so what will we do with this information that we have and so a lot of what we have been reporting to them is what is going on, taking our statistics and putting it in chart from and putting it numerical data. But what do these numbers tell us and what can we do with this information from here?"
Cpl. Jermaine Hyde, Police Department
"The course was a one week course that taught us a lot of structural analysis like she mentioned, but what I will take away from this course is the fact that it taught us that what we were doing was right. We were on track, but what we were doing was merely assumption without supporting what we were producing to our commanders to put forward to the public. Now we will be confident in what we are putting forward because we will support those data with strategic analysis."
18 police officers participated in the training. There are plans to organize a training for police prosecutors and judges.
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