Police barracks eviction was crudely handled

Police officers on Wednesday threw out household property of colleagues who had refused to vacate houses in city barracks. The police authorities had given the officers and their families’ an ultimatum of two days, to vacate the barracks and relocate to their new duty stations (See Daily Monitor, October 20).
Ms Beatrice Akello and Ms Jenipher Aketch are just but a few women whose families will have to find a new place to live as soon as they can. These women are among many others who have found themselves being evicted from the place they have called home for decades.
To be fair, these families knew they were going to be asked to leave. In fact the police had given them two weeks to vacate the premises.
It is indeed true that the evicted families have been taking up space and yet their breadwinners in the police force have been deployed elsewhere. It, therefore, makes sense that the Force would like to have their constables housed where they are deployed.

But the Force seems to be pushing a problem away instead of solving it. For starters, they should have taken time to figure out why these families are stuck in Kampala. For Ms Akello, her husband has been bed-ridden since he was deployed to Moroto. The family is stuck and has nowhere to go. For Ms Aketch, it is because her husband abandoned her in the house, with their children. The experiences vary, but at the end of the day these are desperate families. What the police should have done is an assessment report to find out who exactly is living on those premises, under what circumstances and then created a plan on how to have the families leave with as little fuss and frustration as possible. Those who had abandoned their families should have been warned to take responsibility or else…

Those who have been redeployed should have been supported, perhaps with transport to move their families to the new areas of deployment. More importantly, the police should have given the families more than two weeks’ notice to leave.
The Force cannot just want to get rid of these people as if they are a stain on a piece of cloth. It needs to take responsibility for not having provided proper housing in the first place, allowing families to put up mud wattle houses in the barracks and not following up on officers who were deployed elsewhere but left their families behind.