Officers Endure Tough Conditions at Raccoon Street Station

Imagine showing up to work every day, knowing the roof above your head could leak at any moment, soaking not just your desk, but your morale. That’s the reality for nearly three hundred officers stationed at the Raccoon Street Police Station in Belize City. And while a brand-new building is in the pipeline under the CABEI project, set for Chetumal Street, that’s still a year or two away. In the meantime, Musa says urgent repairs are needed now, because officers can’t keep working under these conditions.

 

Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs

“We had some personnel from the ministry of MIDH come in to do an assessment because at some point it was said that the building is condemned, but that is not, in fact, the report that we are getting; that there are remedial works that can take place. But of course, the fundamental issue with this building is the roofing. And so we are getting quotations, we have submitted, actually, quotations, I think, about three weeks ago, to the Ministry of Finance for there to be constructed an actual roof on top of this building because there is none. It’s an actual flat roof, cement roof, but to build an actual canopy roof to prevent the type of leakage that we’ve been seeing, that doesn’t affect only the third floor, but it affects the second floor and even some of the offices on the first floor. Once that roofing issue has been repaired then we will look at the internal repairs to the building, the office spaces. We do have the CABEI project that will construct a building, a second building on Chetumal Street which a lot of the personnel will be relocated to, but that will take some time, a year or two. The 911 center, all our administration staff will be moved over there. And so, a lot of office space will be freed up on this side, but at the same time, even though that’s going to be a year or two, we have to find ways to repair now because this is an urgent situation that we’ve been seeing recurring every single year.”