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The good intentions that set Uganda police on the road to hell

Wednesday January 31 2018
riot police

Riot policemen rest as they patrol a street in the Ugandan capital Kampala June 28, 2013. FILE PHOTO | REUTERS

By FREDRICK GOLOOBA-MUTEBI

The Uganda Police Force are once again in a pickle, guilty of fraternising with notorious criminals. As has become common in many cases, they have few sympathisers, even among some of their most ardent fans.

As I followed the story of their latest misadventure, two common sayings came to mind: Between a rock and a hard place, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

First, the good intentions: It is common practice throughout the world for law enforcement agencies to use unconventional methods to fight crime. Organised crime is especially suited to unconventional approaches. Infiltration is one. Here law enforcement agencies usually use undercover agents, mainly their own officers.

Highly trained and with vast experience in the art of living among criminals and playing the part, they do pretty much what the criminals do, while also gathering information that will one day be used to nail the bad guys.

The other method is co-optation of criminals into law enforcement agencies as spies, to feed back useful information.

Infiltration calls for high-level sophistication and large outlays of resources for training, equipment and facilitation. That puts it out of reach of poorly funded forces that cannot supply even the most basic of tools, let alone create the right working conditions to motivate officers to take serious risks. Faced with hard-to-crack criminal groups, therefore, the best they can do is co-opt criminals to help fight crime.

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This is how Uganda police found themselves in the embrace of some of the country’s worst criminals. Besides the criminals recruiting some officers into crime syndicates and turning would-be keepers of law and order into facilitators of and collaborators in law breaking, they intimidated others into turning a blind eye to their activities or into becoming silent accomplices.

Over time, things began to look as though the criminals might take over the police. So serious was the threat that none other than President Yoweri Museveni himself called upon the force’s leadership to clean up. And so the good intentions that had led to the original decision to bring in the criminals had set the police on the road to hell.

At the time of writing, Ugandans were witnessing decisive action against the criminals. The task had been outsourced to, or hijacked by, the police’s sister agencies, turning the force into the object of much public ridicule.

One hopes the cleansing will open a new chapter for the law keepers. Perhaps the force will now acquire extra capacities that will eventually make it less dependent on members of the criminal underworld.

Criminals come in handy

This, however, is likely overly optimistic. And this is where the Force finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Being co-opted to fight crime was one way the criminals acquired power and influence to intimidate police officers and had the guts to go around robbing, maiming, and killing members of the public with impunity as media reports have so clearly shown. However, that is only one part of the story.

The other part is that their contribution to “combating crime” grew to include harassing and brutalising members and supporters of opposition parties and disrupting their activities. That they were never called to order made them believe they could get away with murder, literally.

And here, too, the capacity of the police or the lack of it comes into play. Understaffed and underfunded, there is only so much it can do to ensure that members and supporters of opposition parties who are determined to engage in public demonstrations to express their displeasure about this or that do so in orderly fashion or not at all.

And so the criminals come in handy, filling gaps left by inadequate manpower, and taking advantage of their usefulness to the police, the ruling party and the state by engaging in criminality, confident in the belief that nothing will happen to them.

Imagine you are a police chief presiding over a weak, under-resourced and under-manned force but serving a government that wants you to enforce law and order and protect the public against criminal elements.

At the same time you’re required to ensure that opposition parties do not engage in activities that might enable them to eat into the ruling parties support and capacity for winning elections.

What do you do but innovate? And consider that you have two choices. One is to innovate in ways that emphasise protecting members of the public from crime. The other involves neglecting the public interest while producing results for your political bosses. What do you choose? And this leads us straight to where the use and indulgence of criminals originates.

When Ugandans chose to return to multiparty politics in 2005 after two decades of “no-party democracy,” they believed that switching would solve many of their problems. They, however, disregarded one thing. The country was under the leadership of individuals who did not believe in political competition as envisaged by the advocates of conventional multiparty politics.

If future elections were to be won, organs such as the police would have to become major players. Between the competing interests of the general public and those of its political leaders, the police force is truly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]

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