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.