Police Struggling With Case Backlog

July 2008 | Political Risk Alert

Recently released police statistics have revealed that the police are struggling with a backlog of 400,000 unresolved cases, accumulated over the past seven years. In 2000, a total of 17,000 cases out of 68,000 reported to the police had not been closed by year-end, but this rose to 107,000 out of 231,000 cases in 2007. Uganda currently has only 2,800 police detectives nationwide, whereas it is estimated that around 8,000 are needed to handle the number of cases last year. Furthermore, the lack of training and paucity of technical expertise add to the seriousness of the challenge in addressing rising crime, although the putative end to hostilities should allow the government to allocate more resources to a chronically underfunded police force.

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