From police running criminals to criminals running police?

The most powerful statement in the aftermath of last week’s brutal murder of Assistant Inspector General of Police Andrew Felix Kaweesi, his driver and bodyguard, came from President Museveni to Inspector General of Police Gen Kale Kayihura to “clean up the police” which he said has been infiltrated by criminals.
“Witnesses who should help instead are victimised [and] now run to me at State House for protection,” Mr Museveni was quoted as saying. Pointedly, the President made scant, if any, reference to the oft-repeated theory that the murder, and similar assassinations in recent years, are as a result of in-fighting by Muslim factions.

The President has access to the best intelligence and his statements are rarely made without thought. To understand their significance, we need to go back to 1999, when Mr Museveni appointed a judicial commission of inquiry into the police headed by Justice Julia Sebutinde.
While Sebutinde’s report could have used more thoroughness and precision, it laid bare a police force in which criminals enjoyed the protection of senior police officers – including some who rented them the guns they used to commit robberies.
The Sebutinde report was supposed to be a blueprint for reforms to clean up the corrupt police force but few of its recommendations were implemented. Many officials adversely mentioned remained in service. What it did, however, was to provide a justification for not just reforming, but a complete overhaul of the police force.

The police were put under the command of military officers, first Gen Katumba Wamala and then Gen Kayihura and slowly drawn closer to the military, in training, deployment, personnel and command structures.
The size of the Police Force tripled between 2005 and 2013, from 14,000 to about 44,000, while its budget grew 300 per cent from Shs75 billion in 2003/4 to Shs303bn in 2013/14 – an average annualised growth of 30 per cent.
The Criminal Investigations Department and the Special Branch were gutted and retrofitted, and young university graduates were quickly signed up into a force that had previously been seen as a last-resort destination.

A force that had chronically been unable to carry out even basic patrols for lack of transport or fuel saw its fleet of saloon cars grow from 41 in 2003/4 to 232 a decade later; patrol trucks jumped from 125 to 591 while motorcycles went from zero to 3,556.
Yet it now appears that the biggest impact of these reforms hasn’t been to improve the quality of policing but to transform the police into the first line of regime defence. In its noble intention to rebuild the Police Force, the NRM government built it the only way it knew how to; as a military outfit, populated at key positions by loyal cadres, not career policemen.
Investments in law-and-order facilities, such as a forensic lab in Naguru, were matched by investments in coercive tools; in 2003 the police didn’t have a single armoured personnel carrier – by 2013/14 it had 30, most of them relics of apartheid-era South Africa.

What it made up in better materiel, the police force seems to have lost in community and popular support, especially in urban areas politically hostile to the government. To compensate, and fulfil its expanded role as the frontline agency for intelligence collection, the Force appears to have turned to criminal elements, from Kiboko Squad to Kifeesi, to assist in “community policing”.
Police forces the world over work with criminals to gather intelligence but it takes robust internal integrity, both institutional and individual, not to blur the lines. Recent examples of shadowy ‘informers’ openly defying police orders, in some cases appearing to give orders to the police, and anecdotal reports of police officers running protection rackets suggest that those lines were crossed many months ago.
The good news is that the police are better equipped today than they have ever been; they have more men, arms, equipment and resources than at any time in history. The bad news is that they, at worst, seem to have lost the people and, at best, their impartiality.

The late Kaweesi, a fine officer and gentleman according to those who knew him personally, reportedly had seven guards assigned to him. The ratio of police officers to civilians in Uganda is around 1:759. There is something wrong when a man who is the face of a police force has to be guarded by enough men to guard 5,313 civilians.
The best justice for Kaweesi, his colleagues and the thousands of fellow citizens murdered by criminals isn’t just to find their killers but to return the Police Force to the people of Uganda.
Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. [email protected] &Twitter: @Kalinaki