Police transformations good for everyone

Nobody should start demonising the police as an instrument of harassment; psychologically, when you antagonise, you can expect confrontation and police subscribes to the psychological attributes that affect us all!

On January 11, the 3rd Deputy Prime Minister Kirunda Kivejinja launched the Police review exercise at Hotel Africana; the exercise that will look into various issues including recruitment, training and policy and deployment issues in view of the many changes the world and Uganda in particular are experiencing including terrorism, which is the one biggest threats in the world. It is a process of transformation that any institution can ignore at its own peril. It is the first review of its kind yet other police forces around the world routinely carry them out. Ugandans should be happy at this development.

But even before the review kicks off, many other changes have taken place at all levels and prominent among them are the police unit formations and deployments that are a new phenomenon both to the public and the Police family. And it is taking root and the fruits of this change have been enjoyed by the rank and file and the wider public as well. The media has been awash with compliments to the security agencies but the real task for us behind the compliments is to sustain it so that we do not disappoint the people we are mandated to serve.

Nobody should start demonising the police as an instrument of harassment; psychologically, when you antagonise, you can expect confrontation and police subscribes to the psychological attributes that affect us all! Can’t we develop effective communication tools and platforms where we can dialogue more than confront over things we could solve with ease? Where are the think tank platforms I used to enjoy way back in the 90s when I was still in high school?

Mr Augustine Ruzindana, a deputy secretary general of the Forum for Democratic Change, recently insinuated in this newspaper that the Police Force is an instrument of harassment in “We need electoral reforms, not elements of harassment” (Daily Monitor January 13). He wondered why police today is organised under unit formations like those of the military, which traditionally was not the case. The answer lies in the notion that what is not growing is dying. The Uganda Police Force is progressively growing and growth is a process we must appreciate. Who wants to see a police force that is static while the rest of the world is changing? What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

We shall soon roll these developments to the country side as well and we are beginning to come to the people in the review exercise that was launched recently so that we can hear what the public has to say about our operations and policies and a number of other areas so that we can shape up, in view of making our services better for the members of the public we serve.

The Police Force is the most visible instrument of peace and order amidst us. Unfortunately, some politicians think that freedoms are absolute, which is not true. We strongly adhere to the basic principles of legality, proportionality, necessity and ethics in our day to day operations.

However, when individual officers choose to ignore this, we have always asked them to come out boldly and complain against us so that we can rectify the situation immediately because we are accountable to all.

I will not hesitate to remind Ugandans that the Uganda Police Force has a strong unit called, Professional Standards Unit (PSU) that is responsible for our ethical standards. We should always remember that the life expectancy of a lie is always short.

The writer is the Political Commissar, Kampala Metropolitan Police
kaemilian05@yahoo.com