Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"Right now in terms of our overall national crime outlook, we are down in major crime overall but where murders are concerned, we are up by 7 compared to last year. We continue to do our best to be able to address the murders, one murder is one too much but we do understand that we can't stop all from happening but we certainly will continue to do what we can to stop as much as we can and again we continue to appeal to the Belizean people to assist us in whatever way possible to be able to prevent and solve murders. I have to commend the police for the good work done over the past week, we made three arrests for murders, one for the murder of Bobo in Belize City, one for a murder that took place in the St Martin's area, and then one for a murder in Belmopan and this week we should be making an arrest for the murder of Dalla Coin in Dangriga so the investigators remain extremely busy trying to do what they can to solve this cases, again, once we solve these murders and get these alleged murderers off the street, that also serves as a method of prevention because that person will be incarcerated and will not commit another murder unless he is released from prison."

But a lot of the crime has not been gang related - many of them are fights that turned deadly, or crimes of passion. While the police have spent years tackling gangs, we asked the ComPol how difficult it is to change strategies and go after crimes they can't predict.

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"It's extremely difficult but we can't sit and find excuses, we have to find a way to see what we can do to try and allay the problem. One of the issues is that we try to encourage people, if you have an issue with somebody, please tell the police. If a person threatens you and say I will come back later, please tell the police because if we know about it then we might be able to step in and do intervention or mediation but when you take it for granted and don't say anything to the police then it comes back at you and you end up being harmed or killed then people will say, man, I should have told the police. It's too late so that important thing is for us not to take any threat lightly and nay threat we report to the police and let the police see what needs to be done to deescalate whatever may be happening between you and another person."