Posted: Thursday, May 8, 2025. 2:50 pm CST.
By Horace Palacio: Belize’s crime problem is real — and terrifying. Brazen daylight murders, surging gang violence, and an overwhelmed police force have pushed the country into what feels like a state of perpetual emergency. In response, the government has declared States of Emergency (SOEs), giving police sweeping powers to detain individuals without charges — sometimes for up to six months, as newly proposed by Commissioner of Police Dr. Richard Rosado.
But as veteran attorney Richard “Dickie” Bradley warned in a recent interview, this strategy isn’t just a slippery slope — it’s a dangerous illusion. The belief that we can arrest our way out of a national crime crisis is not just short-sighted. It’s a recipe for social collapse.
Bradley points out what many citizens fear but hesitate to say: under these emergency powers, young people — some as young as 14 or 16 — are being locked up for months without charges, without trials, and in some cases, without even telling their families why. No evidence. No process. Just accusations. This isn’t justice. It’s state-sanctioned panic. And it doesn’t work.
Glasgow, once the murder capital of Europe, reduced its violent crime not by locking up more people but by treating violence as a public health issue. The city invested in community policing, mentorship programs, and early intervention. In cities across the United States, models like Cure Violence train former offenders to mediate gang disputes, stop shootings, and intervene before conflicts spiral out of control. Medellín, Colombia, once one of the most violent cities in the world, was transformed through investment in infrastructure, education, and youth employment. Norway and Germany, both with some of the lowest reoffending rates in the world, prioritize rehabilitation over punishment. Their prisons aren’t factories for future criminals — they’re centers for reintegration.
Belize, by contrast, continues to cycle young people through a system designed for failure. We lock them up without charges, traumatize them, and then release them back into the same broken neighborhoods — angrier, more disconnected, and with fewer options than before. What do we expect will happen?
We must stop treating crime as a problem of individuals and start treating it as a problem of policy, poverty, and lost opportunity. Belize needs a national crime prevention strategy that treats violence as both a security issue and a social one. That means investing in mental health services, job creation, after-school programs, conflict mediation, and police reform. It means ending the over-reliance on SOEs and creating a permanent, civilian-led Crime Solutions Commission to explore evidence-based strategies and offer real recommendations. It means holding police accountable, not just arming them with unchecked power.
If the solution to crime was simply to round up suspected gang members and jail them indefinitely without trial, we would already be living in a peaceful country. But as Dickie Bradley so clearly put it, “If the solution to the crime problem was to lock up any and all of them, you see the foolishness in that. That is clearly not a solution.”
Belize doesn’t need more fear. It needs courage — the courage to build, the courage to care, and the courage to change course.
Written by Horace Palacio – Journalist, social thinker, and advocate for national development. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
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The post Fixing crime in Belize: Locking people up isn’t the solution — Building a safer nation is appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
Belize’s crime problem is real — and terrifying. Brazen daylight murders, surging gang violence, and an overwhelmed police force have pushed the country into what feels like a state of perpetual emergency. In response, the government has declared States of Emergency (SOEs), giving police sweeping powers to detain individuals without charges — sometimes for up to six months, as newly proposed by Commissioner of Police Dr. Richard Rosado.
The post Fixing crime in Belize: Locking people up isn’t the solution — Building a safer nation is appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
