Funding forensic sciences will increase criminal convictions

Jan 11, 2016

In order for the Uganda Police to excel at fighting crime, the Government has to boost funding in critical areas

By Nodin Muzee

 

I would like to refer to the New Vision article entitled "KIU Student found dead, feared gang raped ", which was published on the December 3, 2015.

Crime statistics indicate that a staggering 20 female students have been raped and killed since 2014 in Kampala. The majority of these students were enrolled at Makerere University and MUBS.

Some of the readers might be faulted for thinking that a serial killer is on the loose in Uganda, the phenomena of serial killers is not exclusive to the western world as some of the readers may think but they do exist in other lesser developed parts of the world, it is just that some police forces have not developed the sophisticated methods of detecting such offenders

A serial killer is defined as  a person who murders three or more people, usually due to abnormal psychological gratifications, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant break also known as a "cooling off period" between murders.

This is where the Uganda Police are used as a scapegoat for not catching such offenders in time but this criticism is sometimes unfair for reasons I am about to analyse below.

In order for the Uganda Police to excel at fighting crime, the Government has to boost funding in critical areas. For example, research indicates that the Government forensics laboratory has a backlog of 8,000 DNA and 700 toxicology tests that have not been completed due to a lack of funding.

As any prosecutor or criminal defense lawyer will tell you, that the assortment of forensic evidence that the Police gather is the lynchpin or the "glue" that holds together any criminal case and the securing of a successful conviction, therefore, if you are unable to clear this backlog then how will you be able to keep these criminals off the streets and from reoffending.

Secondly, the Government needs to invest in the training of criminal profilers. This is a behavioural and investigative technique and it is intended to help investigators to accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminal subjects or offenders. Such tools would be a great help in apprehending whoever is responsible for the rape and murder of these female students. Their families deserve to get some form of closure.

Finally, we often do not give thanks and praise to the Uganda Police when it is well deserved, this is because they have grown by leaps and bounds and this is evident in the formation of the Police Professional Standards Unit that investigates Police misconduct and then there is the special forces/swat unit formed in 2008 which is trained to deal with hostage situations.

Therefore, the Police are more than capable in setting up a  behavioural Research and Instruction Unit modeled along the lines of what the FBI in America have done and that is to have specialists trained in how to hunt down difficult to catch offenders such as serial killers, serial rapists and terrorists in their various forms

The writer is a criminologist/security consultant

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});