Belmopan, Belize 31 January – The Opposition's response to the crime situation in Belize has been the boilerplate, politics-as-usual approach to call for the resignation of the Minister of National Security as if someone from the government or opposition benches could do a better job.

I thought at first it was a joke: the Commissioner of Police saying at a press conference that criminals were deliberately ramping up crime at the end of 2009 to make him look bad; so crime stats for 2009 could look as bad as in 2008.

It's difficult to decide which is more dispiriting: his honest belief that criminals were sending up stats or his belief that the department's interpretation of its statistics was of real value to the evaluation of crime in Belize City.

So what if the crime stats at the end of 2009 were marginally better than in 2008? Would that have been due to better policing and crime prevention or bad weather that kept criminals indoors for more days in 2009 than in 2008?

People feel that their personal security is in greater jeopardy because it is. There is an increase in daytime assassinations, random and targeted grenade attacks and the ratio of unsolved crime to solved ones.

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