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