Week 7 - An Experience With Corruption

Location: Kampala, Uganda

This week, a friend who had been helping me with my research on refugees asked me if I would accompany him to the police station. About a week earlier, a terrible crime had been committed against one of his family members and he was having little luck working with the Ugandan police. When he first reported the crime, he was told that he would have to pay a fee of 60,000 Ugandan Shillings (roughly 30 USD) if he wished to obtain a police report. For most Ugandans, such funds would be difficult to raise; for a refugee who had just arrived in Kampala a few months earlier, such funds would be impossible to raise. As my friend’s family needed the police report to receive help from the Protection Office at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the corruption of a Ugandan police officer was getting in the way of what could be highly valuable assistance. In asking me to come with him to the police station, my had expected that the police would be much less likely to demand a fee in the presence of an American.

After arriving at the police station, we were directed to the office of the appropriate department head. When we entered, I saw three men sitting on the floor with their hands bound. Now, I recognize that it is nearly impossible to discern the ages of Ugandans, but I doubt that these men could have been much older than my twenty-year-old self. The officer in charge of this particular department then reached down and removed the men’s handcuffs, and with little regard to the fact that my friend and I were watching him, he began kicking them mercilessly. I immediately assumed that they must have committed some unspeakable crime, a crime so terrible that this officer was willing to cast aside protocol to make sure that they were punished. When his legs had gotten tired, the officer then ordered one of the criminals to stand up; subsequently, he slapped him right back down to the floor. One of the men then began crying, and as a result he too was stricken across the face.

After the officer had finished with the men, he turned to us smiled. With the criminals still sitting on the floor, my friend introduced me to the officer and explained to him that he had come to pick up a police report. After shaking the man’s hand, I asked him if he would mind explaining what crime these men had committed: they had been caught smoking marijuana in a public place. Even after I told my friend that such violence would warrant the suspension and even arrest of a police officer in the United States, he simply stared at me with disbelief.

The officer looked at me and then looked right back at my friend and asked, “I remember you from last week, surely you have been given your report by now?” When my friend explained that he had been asked for a fee that he could not pay, the officer contended that it must have been a misunderstanding as he himself had already printed the report. After my friend asked him if he could have the report, the officer then stated that it had been given to an officer in one of the other departments; the problem was, he didn’t know which one. So for the next hour, we went from office to office looking for the illusive police report. When we all excepted that the report had either been lost or non existent, the officer presented us with a proposition: As the report was clearly not in the police station, he stated that he could go to his own home where he could print it off for us. The only requirement, he added, was that we would have to pay him a small fee for transportation. Now, I’m didn’t have that much knowledge about the legal system in Uganda, but I was pretty sure that my friend shouldn’t have had to pay the price for police negligence so we left without a report. After consulting with a Ugandan lawyer, my suspicions were indeed affirmed; the officer had been asking for a bribe in a roundabout way. I know that police are paid close to nothing here, but I do not feel that people should suffer for this. A member of my friend’s family had just been the victim of an unspeakable crime and the officer was only adding to his anguish.