Is the Police crime report really accurate?

By Richard Musaazi

Gauging whether recruitment of Local Defence Unit (LDU) personnel and Security CCTV cameras programme have been successful ultimately depends on how you define success.

On May 27 this year, the Inspector General of Police, Okoth Ochola, released the Annual Crime Report where Police registered 24 more cases of homicide in 2018 than they did in 2017. But what does it mean?

According to the report, courts last year dismissed a total of 11,121 police cases as compared to 9,613 in 2017. The report also indicates that Police secured more 3,302 convictions in 2018 than it did in 2017.

Criminologists have been left puzzled over this apparent decline. What has been even more surprising is that the Police report is based on only reported crimes. Crucially, a lot of crime is never recorded for various reasons.

Many corporate, environmental, financial and organised crimes still lie outside the investigative radar, and often manage to escape identification as illegal activity. Various crimes are concentrated in "hidden'' spaces, such as the home, the workplace and within cyberspace.

While there is cause to welcome a potential decline in crime, we should think twice before drawing the line between falling crime rates and a growth in harmonious social relations. There should be two methods of studying crime statistics - an independent crime survey and Police recorded crime - simply measure it in different ways.

And then count different types of offences. Police-recorded crimes only include offences that come to the attention of Police officers and are entered as official statistics.

The independent crime survey results should include crimes not reported to the Police. The number of violent incidents drop drastically when the diversity of the force matches the diversity of its community.

If you really want to reduce crime, think of effective reforms that build community trust between citizens and the Police that serve them. Below is my breakdown from the Police Annual Crime Report On road accidents Prayer is not a solution to every problem.

What we need is new ideas to curb road accidents. The carnage on our roads has become one of the leading causes of deaths in Uganda. Motor vehicle accidents do not just happen, but they are caused.

More than 9,500 people died in road accidents in Uganda from 2015 to 2017, according to the transport ministry and the situation worsens every year. Despite occasional outrage, little seems to be done to ensure safety on Ugandan roads. What are the causes and what can be done?

It must be acknowledged that the clearest example includes drunken drivers, intoxication with drugs, speeding and fatigue. Drink-driving cases usually increase during festive times.

Other factors affecting road safety include the road system, driver training and licensing, pedestrian awareness and physical disabilities such as poor eyesight of drivers. There are a number of drivers on our roads with very poor eyesight or an insufficient field of vision, for example, poor vision for night driving, and there is no mechanism to check this.

Failure by users to comply with basic road safety legislation is another cause of accidents. There is no use passing laws if they are not to be enforced. We might need to review existing legislation and put in place appropriate enforcement regimes.

The Police are very highly visible on Ugandan roads, but unlike most developed countries, their visibility is for the purpose of extorting money from drivers not for enforcement of road rules.

It is time that visibility becomes a deterrent to speeding and drinkdriving among others as is the case in many developed countries. It is like an airplane falling out of the sky every other day. If that actually happened, the whole system would be ground to a halt until the problem was fixed.

We need to address this terrible problem with the same urgency.Unfortunately, pedestrian deaths — and all road fatalities — are viewed as an inevitable side effect of modern life. We also need a different approach to transportation planning, where road users are held responsible for their own safety.

I believe that to save lives, our roads must anticipate driver, bicyclist, and walker errors, "based on the simple fact that we are human and we make mistakes". One of the biggest problems is that the Police focus more resources on street crime than on street safety.

On CCT V and LDU
Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. The argument that more LDUs less crime is hard to prove. I do not even know whether having thousands of LDUs on our streets makes people feel safer or, possibly, contributes to making them more anxious.

Better policing reduces and prevents crime. Remember the primary role of the Police is to prevent crime. Police prevent more crime by targeting crime generators, as well as hotspot locations and individuals who actually have a propensity to commit crime.

The changing crime environment is presenting new challenges and will require a new approach; the Police cannot function without the support of the public. Policing approach that emphasises fairness and positive interaction is likely to be effective in reducing crime by maintaining and increasing trust and legitimacy.

If you treat people fairly and with respect, they are more likely to co-operate with you, follow your instructions and have respect for the law. Any professional law enforcement officer would know that in a homicide case, the first thing you do is to determine the cause of death. Remember, there are four causes of death.

Homicide, accident, natural and suicide
What we need is more criminal investigation analysts, intelligence analysts, forensic analysts, crime scene investigators and psychology profilers, not LDUs. Like I said in my October piece, measuring how well Police surveillance cameras prevent crime is a tricky process since we are dealing with a vague set of variables. This is not to say that CCTV cameras are entirely useless.

Evidence consistently points out that cameras reduce auto-related crimes as much as 41%. They are also more helpful with reducing crime in enclosed areas with less foot traffic when combined with other law enforcement efforts. And they are helpful in conducting post-crime investigations.

The fall in crime rates certainly offers some potentially comforting reading. But we must not lose sight of the limitations of the Police that produce them. Nor can we ignore the fact that they mask a complex picture of unreported crimes, mutating criminality and harmful activities that can escape detection.

Our commitment should be to develop a clearer understanding of these complexities and the current inequalities and social divisions that overlap with crime.

The writer is a security expert based in UK