By Richard Musaazi
These are tumultuous times for policing in Uganda. Deadly use of force by the Uganda police has led to, heated debates, as well as riots. The Government has created a special task force to help police. At the same time, sharp increases in homicide in the 2020 annual report.
The questions remains can police effectively prevent crime and keep citizens safe, while at the same time, maintaining the community’s trust and confidence? Both objectives form the bedrock of policing and neither should have the standing to trump the other. But in difficult times our national discourse focuses on one objective over the other. Today, the focus is on citizens’ confidence in and trusting of the police. To achieve these objectives two principles must be…The first is that crimes prevented, not arrests made, should be the key metrics in judging police success in keeping the public safe. Decades of research lead to a provocative bottom line: we can’t arrest our way out of crime. Neither “broken windows” nor “zero tolerance” policing tactics that make lots of arrests for minor offenses have been shown to be effective in preventing crime. However, there is much evidence that other proactive and problem-solving alternatives that do not emphasize arrest are effective.
Secondly, citizen’s reaction to the police and their tactics will determine how successful police is in preventing crime.. This principle seems to have been lost in the heated debates. One side argued that these tactics were effective in preventing crime and were applied in a non-discriminatory way, and the other side argued they were ineffective and discriminatory. Strikingly absent are two important acknowledgements: that citizen reactions matter, regardless of crime control effectiveness; and there’re many evidence-based alternatives to with far less noxious impacts on community relations.
Creating balance between these two principles requires fundamental adjustments to the practice and expectations of Ugandan policing. Such reinvention starts with seven important changes:
1) Prioritize crime prevention over arrests.
The priority must be crime prevention—not arrests. This does not mean that police should stop making arrests—arrests for serious crimes are necessity but more than 80% of arrests are for minor crimes. My research shows that would-be offenders are not deterred by harsh punishment or by rapid response and clearing cases. Preventative alternatives work better, and these include proactively targeting problem places, people, and situations with problem-solving, and deterrence measures that may include non-police partners.
2) Create and install systems that monitor citizen reactions with to the police and report results back to the public.
Police should routinely survey citizen’s reaction to the police. Results of surveys should be regularly reported back to both citizens and officers. The purpose of feedback should not just be informational; it should also include the changes in police strategies and tactics made in response to the polling information.
3) Reform training and redefine the “craft” of policing.
The content of police training depends on what the stakeholders define as the “craft” of policing ie— the functions, purposes, and methods of good policing. Current training reinforces a traditional, reactive and arrest orientation in policing. If we want officers instead to see their craft in terms of prevention and citizen reaction, they need to be trained in the tools and perspectives necessary for achieving these two objectives.
4) Recalibrate organizational incentives.
The metrics used to judge performance and suitability for promotion should measure the officer’s knowledge of evidence-based strategies known to reduce crime and improve community trust and confidence. Candidates for promotions should be evaluated on how well they translate this knowledge into practise. The basis for awarding medals, citations, and commendations should be given for preventing crime or improving citizen-officer interactions as well as success and bravery in apprehensions.
5) Strengthen accountability with more transparency.
Police accountability encompasses a complex array of legal, procedural, and organizational issues, transparency is a vital part of this. Large gaps in the availability of data and policies related to police-citizen interactions should be closed — particularly those involving the use of force. The public should be regularly informed of the outcomes of investigations into allegations of police misconduct.
6) Incorporate the analysis of crime and citizen reaction into managerial practice.
Officers, supervisors and leaders should shift from reactive and procedures-based decision making to more critical thinking and analytic problem solving. This requires that personnel at all levels have access to high quality analysis of crime and citizen reactions and are adequately trained to manage that information to obtain specific outcomes.
7) Strengthen national level research and evaluation.
Years of research in policing have brought us to these conclusions. But as with medical research, we are only at the horizon for cures to some of the toughest problems we face in policing, crime prevention, and police-citizen relations. Yet, Government funding on policing and crime prevention more generally is miniscule compared, for example, to money spent on RDC’s vehicles.
Ugandan policing in the 21st century should be the era when both crime prevention and citizen reaction are recognized as independent values that not only support one another, but also require sophisticated integration into policing organizations.
I want to offer police realistic ways to change the way they work on streets.
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With everything that’s been happening now, this is an opportune moment in the history of policing to highlight not only the fundamentals of policing but what it takes to get us there. This is the perfect time to remind all of us, not just the police, but the citizens and the media, what policing is about. We can’t fix community relations with the police simply by having a community meeting or some superficial thing. You have to reimaging the performance metrics of the police”
How?
The Evidence Based play book – offers Officers concrete ideas for improving and measuring the way patrol officers do their job.
It shows what officers on the streets can do to be proactive,” such as identifying local crime hot spots, directed patrols and preventing repeat burglaries in a neighbourhood after one has occurred.
Leadership: This requires a leader, one that’s critical, experienced and open to change in a dynamic learning environment, but most importantly this leader must be open to the community’s input. In my view, some of the ways you we can measure the success of crime prevention, are for example identifying a crime hot spot, intervening; and if there is subsequent decline, those are some of the reliable indicators. Beyond that, there are things that we know are effective in preventing crime. For example in medicine there are therapies which can prevent conditions from occurring. The same kind of reasoning can be applied in policing.”
www.About the writer. Richard Musaazi is a recognised crime expert and Private Investigator. He owns and manages RPI Global , a business that specialises in on-site and remote digital forensic collection.
