Eighty-eight Murders in 2023?

2023 recorded fewer murders than any previous year, and perhaps going all the way back to 2008. While there was a spate of murders occurring over the extended Christmas holidays, prior to that, the count was somewhere in the vicinity of eighty-four. And when the Christmas holidays ended, so too were the lives of Christian Ramos, Darnell Puerto and Kaleem Chun by gun violence. Two of them occurred in Belize City and the other in Punta Gorda.  Back in September, when the Belize Police Department’s Crime Observatory had released its Compstat figures, Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams had indicated that the last time Belize recorded murders in double digits was back in 2013 with ninety-nine murders. And the least deadliest three years going back have been that same year – 2013, 2020 when there were a hundred and three murders, and 2022, when there were a hundred and thirteen. With the murder count for 2023 at around eighty-eight, the police department credits the Leadership Intervention Unit for the number not surpassing the one hundred mark.