Adele Ramos, the technical coordinator for the Belize Crime Observatory,
was one of the presenters at this GIS conference, and she gave a detailed
account of how this government agency has used GIS applications to
carefully analyse the country's major crime trends.
An interesting part of her presentation today was a snapshot of the
2020 murder count, and how the COVID-19 pandemic and the states of
emergency caused the country's numbers to fall in a very noticeable
way.
Here's here detailed look at the countrywide overview, and then her
focus on Belize City:
Adele Ramos - Technical Coordinator
"This slide shows you the pre and post covid scenario with respect to
Belize City and these zones that you see there on the Belize City map, we
map them using the information obtained from the police department, so the
state of emergency zone on south side, you notice where you had the murders
occurring before the whole covid-19 measures went into effect and then from
that point on to the end of June, there were only 2 murders in Belize City,
so you saw a substantial shift in what was happening in Belize City. So
where are we today, nationally, murders have declined 24.77%, so between
January and October 2019, there were 109 murders, January to October 2020
there were 82 murders registered but don't tell that to the people in
Corozal and Stann Creek because they have seen an increase, so if we look
here at the 2 maps side by side January to September 2020, January to
October 2020, we see where Corozal and Stann Creek recorded increase
relative to the same period last year, so the darker the green, then
greater the increase, light green, almost white represents of course your
declines. When we look at where we are at least up to the end of October
2020 compared to the same time last year, Belize City accounted for 38
percent of the murders nationally, for the same period this year, Belize
City accounted for 43%, so even though there has been a decline in the
national level and there is been a decline in Belize City generally, the
proportion has increased by 5%. Of course you know covid has been
devastating on us, particularly I didn't touch on the aspect of gender
based violence because it's so complex, sexual violence, the impact there
has been quite adverse but we say that every cloud has a silver lining and
so there is a silver lining in the covid-19 cloud, that based on what we've
been seeing and if this trend continues, this will be the first time in 7
years that Belize's murder rate could fall. So, the projection is that on
the current trajectory, that the number of murders could possibly remain
below 100 for 2020, resulting in a murder rate around 25 to 100,000
inhabitants"
In Ramos's presentation, she discussed how GIS helped the observatory
to identify that special crime interventions may be needed for Corozal
and Stann Creek, as well as the need for targeted crime prevention
measures in Belize City.
Channel 7