With shoot-to-kill in effect, trigger-happy cops are having a ball

By GRACE NAKATO

When you hurt my brother, you can be sure my whole family will be out to seek vengeance. The police force must have subscribed to my family maxim, as they have now been urged to enforce a shoot-to-kill order on thugs who are targeting police officers and steal their guns. The Flying Squad police unit will be the enforcers.

In present day Uganda, thugs come armed to the teeth with submachine guns, pistols, AK 47 assault rifles, chainsaws and machetes. And shockingly, they engage the police in shoot outs in broad daylight. Robberies and violent crimes have been escalating as we head into the holiday season.

Co-exist

Could it be that the increased spending is causing the neighbour’s eyes to turn a dark shade of green and their hearts into a hard black mass. The haves and have-nots in Kampala are known to co-exist within the same environs, as there are no building codes and structures mushroom depending on the power of the owner’s pocket.

The new police mandate to put people found with guns at scenes of robberies “out of action” is reminiscent of Operation Wembley. President Museveni set up a team composed of soldiers and other ad-hoc operatives who were not necessarily trained in law enforcement and baptised them “Wembley”.

According to him “The robbers, the police and the judiciary were related just like the palate and the tongue. The police would make the statements poorly and the thirsty magistrates would release the robbers to continue terrorizing people.”

Dawa ya moto ni moto! At the peak of Operation Wembley, suspected robbers were shot on sight, and their bodies left at the scene for a few days to ensure wananchi got a good look.

Incarceration

This helped instill the chill of fear on aspiring thugs. The dead thugs were lucky! Suspects were motivated to share information with the squad through the application of heavy military boots, fists, clubs and other implements that would put the KGB interrogators in Robert Ludlum novels to shame. There are rumours of the removal of fingernails with pliers and pulverising of privates to ensure thieving genes are not propagated into the next generation. The head of the Wembley boys did after all, get his training in Russia.

Wembley was a success and crime rates in the region fell drastically, enabling us to walk the streets fearlessly even in the dead of the night. Human rights activists, however, did not agree with the waterboarding ways of investigation and the unit was disbanded with a few diluted versions coming up in the last decade to combat crime humanely.

Today, incarceration has failed to reform criminals, and has become a recycling tool as the whole world goes green. Thugs are arrested, charged, jailed and then released after serving the requisite term. The recycled thugs are more organised and their leaders are suspected to be members of security organisations. Petty crimes have been on the rise, escalating to violent crimes. This has led to mobile money dealers and prominent businessmen have been regularly going to check out their heavenly mansions via the hands of a few known thugs.

Unfortunately, the threat of the shoot to kill order will see many of us avoiding altercations of any kind with “connected people”. Land grabbing and ménage a trois (Ugandan euphemism love triangles) will now have a clean avenue of resolution to the detriment of the innocent mwananchi.