Prompted by our story we published last Saturday about the army reportedly taking over Kabalye Training School in Masindi, the Police has defended the military presence at the institution.
Speaking Monday to the media, the police publicist CP Fred Enanga whereas insisted that police is still in charge of the school, he said the soldiers will equip trainees with sophisticated skills to suppress the violent society Ugandans have become.
He confirmed that the trainees will undertake three months of army training.
In these pages, we reported that UPDF had dispatched 17 combatants to Kabalye and many more were waiting deployment to the facility.
“There was somebody who was raising an issue that the police training school in Kabalye is being taken over by the UPDF soldiers. This is quite unfortunate because there is nothing like that. The training at Kabalye for recruits and learner Assistant Inspectors of Police (AIPs) is police-led. It’s the Police who are in charge of that training,” said Enanga.
Adding that, “Why we always take our officers through military approaches is because the training helps them to improve their skills especially when handling paramilitary situations. These days we have seen that there is too much violence in the community, increase in population, several urban centres are coming up which requires our officers to have these military skills to counter paramilitary nature of the environment.”
Upon completion of the course officers will be able to adapt to challenging environment and taking on difficult tasks.
“There certain environments which are challenging like the hard to reach areas such as Karamoja, working in mountainous areas, so this military training enables them to accomplish such tasks. Currently, people fight with Police, so for an officer to be able to handle such encounters needs some military skills,” he said.
According to Enanga after the accomplishment of the military training which commenced on Monday, October 14, they will transit typically into the Police law training.
This will include modules on arrests, special laws on traffic and the penal code. Towards the end of their course in the last three months, they will be sent to detach stations for on the job training.
“What the media especially the social media was coming up with that the military has taken over the training is not true what we always do when it comes to military courses. We invite the military from the artillery school from Masindi and they jointly handle the military training together with our officers,” he said.
About 800 trainers from the police will conduct this training with the help of the military in the first three months.
There are over 4500 recruits and 500 learners AIPs.