Kampala Central Police Station

Yesterday I watched a police officer beat a man with a cane. Viciously. In the middle of the Kampala central police station.

We were there to meet with a client who had been arrested on a bogus charge and to try to get him out on a police bond. Uganda has a fascinating bail/bond law that I don’t think exists in the United States. In the U.S., if you are arrested, you (are supposed to) get a bail hearing very quickly. At the hearing, the judge determines whether you can get out on bail (by paying a certain amount of money) or if you can go free on your own recognizance. Uganda is different, and strangely a little bit better. Here, you can get a police bond. If you get two people to come to the station and vouch for you before your bail hearing occurs, which typically (I think that should read “sometimes”) is within 48 hours of arrest, the police must release you under a police bond. You don’t have to pay anything. But you need to report to the police station on a specified date; by then the police should have completed investigating the crime and will decide what to do with you. You want to get out on a police bond because otherwise you’ll have your bail review hearing, and anything can happen. If you don’t have a lawyer and the court can’t find you one, the judge almost invariably will just “remand” you. Even with a lawyer, you very well might be "remanded." Being “remanded” is a very bad thing. It means you are sent to prison. Getting you out of prison is tough. Very tough. So, you want to get out on a police bond at all costs. That's why we were there—to get our client out on a police bond.

Now that you understand a bit of the legal background, I can get back to the beating. We sat in the lobby (if it can be called that), waiting for a local criminal defense lawyer / friend of my colleague to meet us and help us navigate the system. Every few minutes, several police officers entered, dragging two or three suspects past the lobby intake area and downstairs to the holding cells. I did not get to see the holding cells, but I hear they are tiny and packed with suspects. I hope to see and describe the holding area one day for you—preferably, not from the inside.

About ten minutes after we arrived, three police officers struggled to drag in a single man. The man was either drunk or high or crazy because he kept falling over as they dragged him through the police station. He was flailing his arms, struggling to break free. But he couldn’t. Not only because three cops were holding him, but also because one of the officers (he was young, younger than 25) pulled out a wooden cane, lifted it over his head, and beat down on the suspect. On his arms and on his legs. They took him around the back, behind the three desks in the lobby where officers sit (I'm not sure what they do), and that young officer beat him some more. Whack. Whack. Whack. Everyone could see it. Most people ignored it or didn’t notice it—perhaps because it wasn’t unusual. I stared. I couldn’t look away. It was gruesome.

The police station is an interesting place. When we arrived, my colleague put her purse and phone down on a table and walked through the metal detector. It beeped. She picked up her bag and phone and continued walking. I did the same. The detector beeped. Every time a person walked through, it beeped. The two guards, armed with rifles didn’t flinch, just sat chatting with each other. I assume (hope?) that it makes a different noise if someone has metal on them. It probably does, but in Kampala, you can never be sure, not even at the central police station. I say this because the police station has no security. You can walk anywhere, up the stairs, down the stairs, in the back, to the side, anywhere in the building, and nobody will stop you. No guards patrol, protecting the station. The only protectors are the two guards at the entrance not monitoring the never-ending beep-o-meter.

After we went through the detector, we sat and waited. I was the only white person in the station, and everyone stared at me. My coworker told me that the only non-black people who come to the police station are Human Rights Watch workers, so everyone just assumed that I was one.

In my first three posts, I refrained from using the terms white and black. But, I’ve begun to accept that refraining misleads my readers; ignoring the real facts on the ground over here only misrepresents the truth. There is black and white here. People distinguish by the color of one’s skin. Not in a nasty way, not in a negative way, but in a highlighting of differences way. And whites receive automatic, unearned respect from most people here. It’s strange; it’s uncomfortable. It's wrong, and it needs to change. But I’ll discuss this in more detail in another blog post. Back to the police station…

After the beating ended, my colleague’s friend arrived and we walked into some sort of records or booking room to find out where we could find the officer investigating the crime with which our client was charged. The room was tiny. A female cop sat behind the desk and owned that place. When our friend tried to explain what we needed, the cop pointed at the sign behind her that said visiting hours of inmates are between 7am and 8am, 1pm and 2pm, and 7pm and 8pm. It was 3pm. If we wanted to wait until 7, we could do that. She was very dismissive, but our friend persisted a bit, said something to her in Luganda, and she eventually opened a composition notebook on her desk. That was the only record of people brought in and arrested at the police station—a composition notebook. I’m sure the station stores the notebooks for the other weeks somewhere, but no central computer system contains all of this information.

She flipped to the date of arrest and we found the name of our client, the charge and the office number of the investigating officer. We climbed several flights of stairs and went to room 64, only to find out that she should have written 54 on the paper. We descended some stairs unaccosted, permitted to go wherever we wanted. We passed by the traffic court (a room filled with police officers deciding what fine to levy on the person arrested for a traffic violation; the person can appeal if she disagrees with the officer’s “judgment”). When we finally arrived in room 54, we spoke to the arresting officer and learned that our client already had been let out on a police bond.

Nobody had informed us. This is Kampala.

My First Outreach Meeting - Some Serious Frustration

It has taken a little over a week for me to become upset. I am now upset. Before arriving in Uganda, I knew that I’d have my work cut out for me. But only yesterday did I realize how important of an issue police corruption is here, how pervasive of a problem it is, and how it seeps into every element of life. We cannot help people unless we figure out a way to address police corruption (or at least, perhaps, to avoid any need for using the police).

I don’t know if this blog comes up in a google search. I don’t know if the government here monitors foreign tourists’ blogs. This might be a dangerous post, and perhaps I should keep all of this to myself. But I’ve always believed that giving people information is the best way to bring about change. Hiding bad information only prolongs the problem. Besides, I'm not important enough for anyone to be snooping, and everybody here talks openly about police corruption, so it isn’t as though I am divulging any secrets.

I went to an outreach meeting yesterday, where we spoke with young community leaders (men and women in their early twenties) who wanted to understand how they could help people in their communities. We taught them basic information about their inherent legal rights, the rights guaranteed to them by the constitution and the laws here. But, one guy in the audience stood up. He was angry. He used the word “confused” to describe his anger. He is a young civic leader, but one with no power. A frustrated leader. (This all took place in English by the way.) The young twenty-something said, “If I wake up in the morning and beat someone, the cops will come and take me away. But, I can be home 1 hour later if I pay the cops 10,000 shillings ($5 USD). What rights are you talking about? Those rights are being abused. I tell my landlord that I get paid on the 5th of the month and so won’t be able to pay rent until then. He tells me ok. When I come home from work on the first, the landlord has thrown all my stuff out because I didn’t pay rent. I tell him we had an agreement. He doesn’t care. I go to the police, but the landlord bribes the police and they beat me up, and I now have nothing. I go to the chairman (the head of the local government, called the local council), but the landlord is the secretary of the local council. The chairman does nothing. Are these rights? Is this right? You told me about the laws, about my rights, but you aren’t answering my question. What can we do?”

I stood up and told him, “What you are saying is that you don’t, you can’t trust the police. You can’t and don’t trust the local government. Is there anyone with power that you do trust? Anyone?” But he had no response. I asked if any of his relatives had friends in the police force, if he had friends with relatives in the police force, anybody he knew, some starting point of trustworthiness. But there was none. He had none.

This entire exchange really bothered me. Others spoke, explained similar problems. It all came down to the same thing.

How can I help develop a legal aid program here if there is no enforcement mechanism, if the enforcement mechanism is the problem itself? Is going to court here meaningless because there is no force behind any rulings? I've got a lot to learn. I know I can’t change Uganda. I’m sure others have tried to address this problem from the inside and out. I don’t know what to do. But, I better figure out something.

My First Child Labor Awareness Meeting

My first work-related assignment in Uganda was attending a child labor awareness meeting in a Kampala slum. We were in the Inkere Zone of the Kabuye Parish of Kampala’s Makindye division. (Kampala is a district, and like all districts in the country, it is split up into divisions, divisions into parishes, and parishes into zones. Hence, I was wrong in my previous posting when I said that the school was located in the Kyengera district of Kampala; it actually was outside of Kampala, in the Ugandan district of Kyengera.) We headed down the slum’s unpaved rocky, potholed dirt roads, which are lined with 2 foot deep ditches that serve as make-shift sewers. In some places, there are grates over the ditches, but in most places, if you aren’t looking you will just fall in. Even areas with grates can be dangerous because the metal rods are not sufficiently close together, so a child easily can get her foot stuck, as can a slender-footed adult.

Behind the ditch-sewer system are shacks, small shacks attached to shacks attached to shacks; these are all shops peddling fruit, eggs, milk, pots and pans, potatoes, you name it. Every shack has a sign in English: “Milk”; “Coca Cola”; “Yogurt.” Every 40 feet or so, a gap between the row of shacks serves as a path (a bumpy path that looks as though it was dug up unevenly with a shovel) to the little homes behind the shacks. We stayed on the “main road” lined with shacks, so I did not get a good glimpse of the houses beyond. Hundreds of people walk down the slum’s unpaved dirt roads at any given time.

Lots of children, all wearing the same plastic sandals, often much too big for their feet, run around or just sit on the ground next to (I assume) their parents who are trying to sell something out of their shop or on the street. Too many kids are forced to work in the Makindye division. The local, independent paper (there also is a government-run paper) reported yesterday that 12,700 children are in the informal work sector in Makindye alone.

As we entered the slum, a large truck blasting music was driving down the “main road.” The passenger was screaming something from the truck’s loudspeakers. My colleague explained that the truck was advertising a concert to be performed by Jose Chameleon, a famous Ugandan musician. A few minutes later, another similar truck drove by, this time telling the locals about a Weasel concert. Weasel is Chameleon’s brother, my colleague told me. “They are brothers, but they don’t talk,” she said. “Chameleon has been around longer. Weasel is better. They hate each other.” Well, now you know about the Chameleon-Weasel brotherly rivalry...

We arrived at our destination, the only bar/club in the slum; it’s about 25 feet long by 40 feet wide. Its width is about the size of 6 or 7 of the little shop-shacks surrounding it on both sides. The walls of the building are a thin, rusting tin. A courtyard greets you as you enter. The women and children (and the few men who attended) sat in the courtyard to listen to the speaker brought by my organization. In some spots, bamboo lines the inside part of the tin walls (not sure why). The speaker stood in front of the audience and presented. Behind the speaker was a small room with a pool table. Two local men – probably in their late teens or early twenties – were playing pool, drinking beers, and smoking cigarettes throughout the three hour presentation. They ignored the sign that said “No Smoking,” not disrespectfully, but simply because, I think, it didn’t actually mean “No Smoking.” I think it was just a piece of artwork the bar had on the wall, like the “Coca Cola” sign or the sign that said “a beer balanced to perfection” or the “Car Parking Behind” sign. There certainly was no parking in the back. The joint also didn’t have a “garden for all parties and leisure times,” despite the sign saying so.

My organization was there to teach the impoverished residents of the slum about Ugandan laws relating to children. Rather than presenting themselves, my colleagues bring in outside, local experts as speakers, which I think is an effective model because the local experts have real authority. The expert that day was a probation and welfare officer who focuses on child issues. He spoke for about two and a half hours and fielded questions from the audience of mostly women. He implored the adults to teach personal information to their kids. He said that kids often don’t know who they are and when they get lost or are abandoned, it becomes very difficult to find their families. By way of example, he called on a little boy and asked him, “What’s your name, boy?” The kid responded, “Boy.” “And your mom’s name?” “Mama.” “Your dad’s name?” “Dada.” “And where do you live?” “At home.” “And your dad, where does he work?” “At the shop.” Everyone laughed, but the probation officer made his point. A worrisome point.

After that, the probation and welfare officer spent about thirty minutes speaking directly to the kids who showed up (they got free muffins for coming; the adults, free sodas). He told them how important it is to go to school, not to be stubborn, and to do their reading. He told them the story that I told the school kids the next day (alluded to in my previous post). He said, “there was a kid who came home from school with poor grades and opened a soda. His father took the soda and poured it on the ground, telling the boy that a soda is a reward for good grades. Trying to incentivize his boy, the father told his son that if he comes home with good grades, he’d buy the boy an entire crate of sodas. The boy, upset, told his dad that he would get good grades, but he’d refuse a crate of sodas. Instead, he’d do so well in school that he’d get a good job one day and buy himself an entire truck full of sodas!”

All the kids in the crowd laughed and a good chunk of them seemed inspired. But nobody matched one boy who didn’t move from his seat and just stared with great focus at the speaker throughout the two and a half hour presentation. While the other boys fidgeted around, poked their friends, and only paid attention from time to time, this one boy didn’t move. He just stared and listened. When we left, I couldn’t get the little boy off my mind. I was sure that he’d learn his name, his parents’ names, where his parents’ work, and his home address. And he’d buy that truck of sodas one day, maybe even an entire warehouse.