By Steven Masiga
The constitution of Uganda and the Police Act cap 303, particularly Sec 4 casts a statutory Responsibility to police, to fight crime and protection of people and their properties among others, and executing this police does it consciously on behalf of the state and the state is an entity of force as it is meant to induce obedience through force and not prayers, perpetrators of crime are punished for their crimes.
Researchers findings indicate however that many citizens sometimes don’t report many crimes occurring in their communities to the attention of authorities and thus such unreported crimes go uncaptured by police statistics on crime.
It is trite that police may not have the capacity to detect every crime whether it is an American police or British police.
That would be too impossible to execute, after all the law doesn’t recognize what is so impossible to execute, thus a multitude of speculations exist both scholarly and a prior as to why many citizens in various countries don’t report crimes to authorities.
The pettiness of the crime may make some body who lost his property to loose interest in reporting the crime. For example, a stolen slipper, or some old saucepans or a mild fight during booze as the costs of what was stolen is far less compared to what will be incured, while other citizens want to eschew the shame that accompanies the crime. For example defilement, rape and bestiality where the owner of the cow or goat might have aphobia that his raped cow might lack market if a story is broken to tha effect that some body had sexual intercause with it.
Sometimes victims make more headlines than the perpetrators of crime as on most occasions victims could be of a certain hierarchy compared to the perpetrators.
There are also situations when the police itself implicates the victims as suspects in the absence of a substantive suspect.In USA, some eye witness who had recorded a crime taking place was put in cells by police, and a number of people talked to before this write up, claim that the police is corrupt and others claim language barrier prevents them from reporting crimes to police, especially far off districts.
Many Ugandans deliberately forgive their fellow citizens for crimes committed against them if they are petty enough.
Generally police statistics indicate that crime rate in Uganda is declining. Last year there was 9.8% reduction in crime rate and this year it could go lower because of the covid-19 policing efforts where movement at night was hampered since most crimes occur at night, with the total elimination of LRA and ADF political crimes are down.
In law whenever a crime has been committed, there are usually defenses that an accused can rely on to escape punishment ranging from alibi, insanity, duress, infancy ignorance, mistake of fact and claim of right among others..
Most of these are afforded under the PCA, the mother law on crimes in uganda and case law.
Government through the LCs should encourage recording and reporting of crimes including those handled by LCs and others like churches as some churches even have certain punishments for those refusing to paying tithe.
Generally many churches exercise coercive power over their members as if they are a state instead of concentrating on divine guidance.
Steven Masiga is a veteran transformative researcher on crime, local governments and education.
For comments and remarks reach him on +256706655811
