The increased violence in Uganda requires military skills in order to suppress it.
It is for this reason that police recruits will undergo a three-month military training, the Force has confirmed.
Over the weekend, social media was awash with rumors that the Police recruits will be trained by Uganda Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF) soldiers. A lot of queries were raised with many blaming police authorities for militarizing the Force, whereas others were alleging that the army has taken over Kabalye Police Training School.
However, Police spokesperson Fred Enanga on Monday, during a weekly Police press briefing at Central Police Station (CPS) said trainees will only attend military training for three months and then go for other police drills.
“There was somebody who was raising an issue that the police training school in Kabalye is being taken over by the UPDF soldiers. This is quite unfortunate because there is nothing like that. The training at Kabalye for recruits and learner Assistant Inspectors of Police (AIPs) is police-led. It’s the Police who are in charge of that training,” said Enanga.
He, however, said that the reason why UPDF soldiers are at Kabalye is to train the recruits some military tactics because the current Police tactics are not enough to handle a violent society like Uganda.
“Why we always take our officers through military approaches is because the training helps them to improve their skills especially when handling paramilitary situations. These days we have seen that there is too much violence in the community, increase in population, several urban centres are coming up which requires our officers to have these military skills to counter paramilitary nature of the environment,” said Enanga.
He added that military training will enable their officers to accomplish difficult tasks in a challenging environment.
“There certain environments which are challenging like the hard to reach areas such as Karamoja, working in mountainous areas, so this military training enables them to accomplish such tasks. Currently, people fight with Police, so for an officer to be able to handle such encounters needs some military skills,” he said.
According to Enanga after the accomplishment of the military training which commenced on Monday, October 14, they will transit typically into the Police law training.
This will include modules on arrests, special laws on traffic and the penal code. Towards the end of their course in the last three months, they will be sent to detach stations for on the job training.
“What the media especially the social media was coming up with that the military has taken over the training is not true what we always do when it comes to military courses. We invite the military from the artillery school from Masindi and they jointly handle the military training together with our officers,” he said.
About 800 trainers from the police will conduct this training with the help of the military in the first three months.
There are over 4500 recruits and 500 learners AIPs.
On why recruitments are being made at a time when general elections are around the corner, Enanga said their calendar is independent and has no attachment with political activities of Uganda.
“Our recruitment is to increase the number of Police officers. Currently we are operating at 50 per cent. We are supposed to be 80,000 to get the policing ratio of 1:500 but you find that we are still at 1 officer is policing 950 locals which is a very big margin,” said Enanga.
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