Police should get back to basics of policing

The Internal Affairs minister, Gen Jeje Odongo, on Monday tasked police to examine its deeds against legal mandates to find out if it is performing or not.

“We need to ask ourselves on why we are only being cited in negative stories. We need to address issues that could be giving us that negative image,” he said.

We hold this as a thoughtful and strident counsel. It is instructive, coming from the Force’s political overseer. The timing of the message could not have been more apt than during the Lent, the Christian period for introspection and spiritual renewal. Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura had on Monday carped to the line minister that “our image has been attacked by propagandists”.

Uganda Police Force is a constitutional institution, with core mandates clarified in the supreme law and subsidiary legislations: Protect lives and property and detect, prevent and investigate crimes. It is our chaste view that rather than the knee-jerk reaction of denial and blaming critics, police leadership should demonstrate why, in spite of increased funding, crime is on the rise.

The first pejorative manifestation is police’s refusal to release its annual crime reports for the last three years. We argue that the motivation for this unprecedented concealment could only be that crime is soaring and police leadership is embarrassed a public disclosure of the statistics would be self-incriminating.

The country yesterday woke up to the disturbing news that 28-year-old Susan Magara, whom unknown people kidnapped while on her way home in a city suburb, had been killed. In Buziga, another city outskirt, four unidentified men last Friday kidnapped a Congolese businesswoman named Nganga Bola as she inspected her house under construction.

Troubling reports of goons attacking and injuring citizens at their house gates are countless. Pick-pockets overran mourners at the vigil for musician Mowzey Radio and brazenly filched cellphone handsets and cash. Conmen are on the loose and cybercrime is at an all-time high. Unexplained murders pervade different corners of Uganda. No one is safe.

We ask: How can police convince the victims that it is effective? How can the IGP blame critics when every Ugandan worries about being the next victim of crime? Those with means have had to privatise what should be State-provided security to all by hiring police or private security to guard them. This decay in police is traumatising every Ugandan. Criminals go scot-free when police detectives fail to assemble evidence of value to secure conviction in courts.

We demand that police should get back to the basics of policing rather than dismiss hard accountability questions asked about their performance as calculated to smudge its reputation.

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