Monday, March 13, 2023

To many Belizeans who haven’t had the firsthand experience, the daily police press briefing about this person murdered, that person gone missing , that body turned up in a shallow grave, this home invasion, that gunshot victim refusing to talk, police trying to intervene to stop possible gang retaliation and escalation of violence—it’s all tiresome and somewhat scary news that keeps everyone in an uneasy state, praying that it may all end, and we can somehow as a community return to those often talked about bygone days that older folks remember, when a murder was a very rare thing. But the discomfort and disgust with the repeated serving of violence and death on the evening TV news is one thing; when the reality of that deadly violence, or the threat of that happening actually reaches one’s doorstep, then and only then can we begin to actually feel the raw terror and fear and foreboding that members of a family experience. And we all need to be reminded, it can happen to you.

Solving this rampant violent crime, especially the cold-blooded execution-style murders, would be addressed with much greater urgency if a larger portion of our population would wake up one morning to find ourselves all facing this deadly threat in a real way. It is not so much that the punishment is not severe enough for the guilty, as much as it is that our present justice system can’t seem to find the way to effectively prosecute and bring in guilty verdicts. Not when eyewitnesses are themselves scared to death, or actually put to death to avoid them giving evidence by the coldblooded perpetrators who are backed up by members of their respective gangs. In this mayhem situation, it is not so rare that the case is one of mistaken identity, or more often the “Kyan ketch Harry, so ketch i shut” syndrome, where relatives suffer the consequences of the actions or associations of one wayward son.

Belize doesn’t hang anymore, so any citizen who may be wary of seeing a brother found guilty for killing “his brother man” need not carry the weight of his “neck” on their conscience. But a guilty verdict for one who commits murder is absolutely important, necessary if we hope to bring back our society under control, and stop this one hundred plus murder-with-impunity spree that has been going on for the past three decades. The lives of many fellow living citizens are in all our hands, and it may be you or someone near and dear to you whose life gets spared, if as a community we make an all-out effort to sacrifice the few guilty perpetrators and let them face the consequences of their actions behind bars, where they can seek redemption and rebirth down the road. And if there is any fear for a miscarriage of justice, they will be alive to have their case reviewed until any possible mistake in the carriage of justice can be reversed. It is better for one such mistake to be made, where life allows for the innocent person to later be exonerated, than for twenty or thirty murderers to be walking our streets with the propensity to kill again.

Some citizens take it for a joke when they hear stories about young men who can’t leave their neighborhoods, or who are intimidated to swear allegiance to the particular gang that controls the streets in their area of town. Living the daily reality of a life under threat is something that many Belizeans don’t fully grasp, but a significant number of citizens know and feel that reality daily.

You may think you are safe, and beyond the reach of all that madness, because you and your family are law-abiding, church-going citizens who have never had any mix-up with the law. Heck, a relative of yours may even be a police officer. You feel insulated from all this craziness.

Hey, but you live here in this city too, where your daughter has three beautiful kids, a son in high school and two daughters in primary. She has been a primary school teacher almost fifteen years; her husband works during the week in San Pedro, and does alright in the tour guide business. And as far as you know, he has been an upright young man; exemplary even, a precious son-in-law.

But then, one Wednesday morning around 9:30 you receive an anonymous phone call—from San Pedro the caller says—and he/she tells you that you better tell your son-in-law to “hand up the goods” or his days are numbered; and don’ t dare call the police, otherwise it’s over.

What kind of madness is this?!

Then your daughter calls in a frightened, emotional state. She just got her class interrupted, because the principal informed her of a strange phone call from someone, not her husband, who needed to speak to her urgently about her children. What?! And all she heard on the phone was a heavy breathing …

You call your son-in-law (call him S-I-L for son-in-law), and SIL immediately answers his cell to your relief, but quickly puts you in a panic. He says some masked guys had approached him that morning about a bag of something supposedly picked up near the beach a few days earlier, and apparently somebody had called his name. SIL swore he knew absolutely nothing about whatever, probably a cocaine wet drop, that the men were talking about. But now he was in danger, serious danger. And not only he, but his family. Just like that.

A similar scenario could happen to you or me; you better believe it.

In a country where there is effective “law and order”, hard-working citizens can go about their daily chores with a sense of security and comfort in the knowledge that those few members of society who are inclined to want to commit crime, are significantly deterred by the knowledge that “crime doesn’t pay,” and that their chances of being caught and sent to jail are very high. Not so in Belize right now, it seems. Our police by and large are very good at “picking up the pieces”, and going through the follow-up ritual of their crime investigations after the fact. It wouldn’t be so bad if their efforts resulted in a high rate of convictions. Unfortunately, the most detestable of all crimes, murder, in Belize has a conviction rate of less than 10%.

A few decades ago, a newly elected government fulfilled its campaign pledge to dismantle what had been perhaps the most effective crime-preventing investigative agency to date in Belize, the much-maligned SIS (Security and Intelligence Services) branch of the Belize Police Department.

Perhaps that SIS at the time was being manipulated for political purposes; but with the present crime, and especially murder climate in our country, there is probably the urgent need for some such intelligence arm of the police to become an effective branch of the so-called “multi-sectoral approach” to crime prevention and control in Belize. Another fifty or hundred police officers riding around in pickups or sitting at the street corners behind desks in their uniforms does not sound like the most intelligent allocation of scarce resources in solving our crime/murder problem.

Of course, in revisiting the SIS idea, we must insist on effective safeguards and controls, with a board comprising a cross section of society to ensure its insulation from party political influence. Equality before the law! No free passes for political cronies! Maybe this will help us to bring more murderers to justice, and more peace for a stressed-out citizenry.