The police have offered political answers to questions about crime

What you need to know:

Partisan or even incompetent policing are not new problems but two related things appear to have happened. First, the UPF, with expanded budgets and mandates over crime and political intelligence, became the first line of regime defence.

Much has been made of the wildfire of crime that has engulfed the country. No day passes without smash-and-grab anecdotes, or chilling tales of gangs warning residents about upcoming attacks, or advising them to carry money on them for when they are inevitably accosted.
Beleaguered, the police have responded with turgid proclamations of Tigritude. The latest, this week, turned farcical when some suspects, paraded for the sole purpose of showing the public that the police is on top of the crime, revealed, very embarrassingly, that they are under the protection and patronage of elements in the police.
To many, these and other shortcomings suggest that the police have failed in their cardinal roles of maintaining law and order as well as detecting and preventing crime. Yet Gen Kale Kayihura, who has been IGP since 2005, is easily the longest-serving police boss and could be the longest-serving officer in the same role after his boss.

This means that for all the noise about the performance of the police under him, Gen Kayihura has done something right in his job description. Here history is instructive. When the NRA/M took power in 1986, it set out to recreate the state in its own image.
All existing power centres, from cooperative societies to religious groups to political parties, were destroyed or infiltrated and taken over. Where the NRA/M had structures during the Bush War, these became the national structures, including the National Resistance Council as Parliament, and the NRA as the Army.
Whichever structures NRA/M did not have, it has spent the last three decades hollowing out or deliberately rebuilding in its own image and interest. This is best seen in the judiciary, with the appointment of cadre judges and push back against judicial independence, and in Parliament where it has been relatively easy to generate and maintain a majority.

That left two power centres: the police and the civil service (to be discussed another day). Natural attrition has helped but deliberate efforts have also been made to populate the officer corps with cadres.
Like in other countries, the Uganda Police was a blunt colonial instrument of native coercion. It represented the interests of the colonial state and post-independence governments conveniently inherited these characteristics.
Partisan or even incompetent policing are not new problems but two related things appear to have happened. First, the UPF, with expanded budgets and mandates over crime and political intelligence, became the first line of regime defence.
As political opposition to the regime grew, so did conflict between cops and civilians, especially in urban areas where opposition parties enjoy more support.

This accentuated the public perception of a police force that serves the regime, and not the people, while giving cadre officers extra-judicial leeway in keeping the ‘natives’ at bay. To some, the role of IGP morphed into the ‘Inspector General of Politics’.
Secondly, and partly in response to that growing isolation, the police then resorted to renting support and intelligence, either from well-known criminals or from so-called ‘crime preventers’.
The result has been a predictable dilemma: the more the police stamp down on political dissent the fewer resources they are able to commit to law enforcement.
The fewer criminals the police put behind bars the less trust they receive from the public and the more emboldened the criminals and ‘crime preventers’ become to cash in on their cooperation with the police.

Incidentally, and as this column has previously argued, the solution is fairly easy; relax the grip on political dissent, tighten it on crime.
Opposition politicians and activists marching in the streets can be a nuisance but allowing criminals to smash in doors and hold neighbourhoods hostage, on the other hand, undermines the NRM’s strongest credential—that Ugandans can sleep soundly at night.
Having mastered the art of blocking protestors, the police now discover that they have forgotten how to do good old policing. It is like a student who revises political science notes and then discovers it is a criminology exam; tear gas, for all its power, cannot lift fingerprints off a burglary scene.

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The 40_40 charity (find them on Twitter @40days_40smiles), which supports disadvantaged children, and which I proudly identify with, has a fundraising dinner on May 5 at the Kampala Serena Hotel. Go dine with them and support their cause.

Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki