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What would you do with a million dollars?  Well, if you were the Commissioner of Police you would buy a whole bunch of handcuffs, motorbikes, and aerial drones.  That’s what the commissioner will do with half a million US dollars handed over by the Taiwanese Ambassador today.  Now, one million dollars is a nice chunk of change - but the American have given much more.  Except when they give, it’s always equipment which matches their strategic objectives.  This time, the Taiwanese gave the Commissioner funds to spend on whatever he thinks the Department most needs.  At the handing over today at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Belize City Office, Whylie said its historic

Allen Whylie - Commissioner of Police
"Today is an unprecedented day in the history of the Belize Police Department. Never in my 31 years I can recall the department ever receiving such a humungous gift in terms of 1 million Belize dollars to aid us in our crime fighting and acquisition of resources. We intend to purchase a number of different equipment, we'll have additional motorcycles which will be deployed across the entire country of Belize and we should be seeing also where cycles are deployed to each police substation. That should increase our visibility as well as well as our response time as well as our ability to respond for call of assistance. We also intend to put a number of those cycles in all the districts at the prosecution branch where that will allow the process servers to serve the different processes, warrants, etc execution to ensure that in terms of the prosecution side they are less cases being struck out because witnesses are not being summoned. We are also going to acquire a number of drones which will again be deployed during anti-crime operations because drones as part of the department embracing technology drones can provide us wide coverage in terms of when we operating. It will give us an eye from the air that we are able to see targets or suspicious persons or movements. We are also looking at acquiring a number of handcuffs where each police officer will be able to assign first time in their career perhaps a personal handcuff."

Hon. Wilfred Elrington - Minister of Home Affairs
"We decided to seek source of funding and of course the immediate response came from the Taiwanese, it is good to have an ambassador who was a former police officer. This was entirely driven by our own senior police officers. The commissioner met with his people to determine what they needed, they informed us and then we made the request. They actually complied the list of what they needed, we submitted it to Taiwanese and then they decided to fund it. So they gave us as much as a million dollars which was more than what we had hoped for to be able to buy all that we need to take care of the immediate need of the police.”