BELIZE CITY, Mon. Feb. 28, 2022– A series of shooting incidents were reported in Belize City over the weekend—with some of those incidents being reported as early as Thursday afternoon, February 24. However, when police arrived at the location of many of the reported incidents, there was no indication that any such incident had occurred.

Communications Director for the Belize Police Department, ASP Fitzroy Yearwood, mentioned in Monday’s police press briefing that a number of the reports they received of shooting incidents may have been false.

“Let me be honest, Saturday night we got a lot of calls from all over the city about shootings. When officers visited these scenes, most of these scenes didn’t materialize to be any shooting scene and nobody came out to the police and made any report in like four or five different calls that were relayed to our police control room. I monitored these information very closely, especially knowing people would want to cause mischief in the city. But whenever I report on a shooting scene, it’s because we have established one did occur,” he said.

ASP Yearwood was asked if these so-called ‘false reports’ were a ruse of criminals to direct law enforcement personnel to a certain area while committing their crimes elsewhere.

“The way we have our patrol set up in Belize City, it’s not like before where we just had one central police station. So in each precinct area, we have different patrols set up so that now when you have a shooting incident reported, we wouldn’t send more vehicles needed in that zone so as to not leave the rest of the city naked. When people believe that they can pull our resources to one area and concentrate our officers in that zone to go out and commit a crime in another area. Then we have surprises for them, our method of policing has changed to suit our time and we notice that the criminals have done their homework and believe they can elude us. But in most of these cases, we have our police respond very rapid in the entire city,” he replied.