Police can do better

Shame Isaki Correspondent
The Zimbabwe Republic Police is an internationally acclaimed police organisation which has won rare reviews for effectively and professionally discharging its duties at various international platforms under the auspices of the United Nations peace keeping missions. Back home over the years, the same force has been highly effective in ensuring that the citizens are protected from rogue elements of society and that the general security of the State is maintained. The police force forms part of the State security apparatus which comprises the Central Intelligence Organisation, the Zimbabwe National Army and to an extent the Zimbabwe Prison Services.

However, it is important to note that of all the security organs the State has, it is the police which is highly interactive and exposed to the generality of the populace and other organisations, civil or otherwise.

In a way the police plays a very central and crucial role in the matrix of State security and civilian welfare. I am one member of society who has been impressed by the performance of our police force in detecting crime, busting syndicates and bringing to book criminals on the run.

In fact our force can be described as competent even in the face of acute resource shortages. Like all state institutions, private institutions and voluntary organisations, the force has not been spared too from the prevailing economic situation and that’s why even recently there was a war of words between the force and the tax collector over the former’s non-remittance of funds collected from traffic offenders with the latter insisting that its keeping of the funds was above board and extremely necessary for its day to day operations since it was severely under-funded.

The tax-man gave up and up to date the force is still retaining all the funds it collects from traffic offenders and l am not sure if it remits funds for other crimes.

Now there seems to be a public uproar over the manner in which the police, particularly those based at Mutare Central responded to a distress call from Bishop Manhanga as reported in last week’s edition of The Manica Post and apparently before the Bishop’s incident another family from Morningside had also suffered the same traumatising experience at the hands of suspectedly the same criminals and the police were informed again but like in the Bishop’s case took time to respond.

The Morningside family actually alleges that one of the robbers had the audacity to join their maid in the lounge to watch TV, imagine! This is according to the victim’s testimonies and the police have defended themselves saying that they are incapacitated in terms of movement and so could not timeously respond to the distress calls. Also according to the victims the police landlines are not functional and other hot-lines supplied by the same force which makes it virtually impossible to access the force when faced with a dangerous situation.

Now if the police are failing to manage their communication system at the expense of the threatened public, it becomes a cause for concern surely. If a Central Police Station has a dysfunctional phone system and it seems no effort has been made to rectify this situation over a long period of time then it’s as good as we are all vulnerable.

The police cannot attend to a crime scene because they have no vehicle and this is after the victims have struggled to get through to them. This is surely unacceptable. There are several police vehicles in Mutare and though they may not be enough, common sense dictates that there should always be an emergency vehicle on standby to attend to scenes like the one reported last week.

If police cannot attend to a crime scene barely 2km away, what then happens to those who are in Vumba or Chigodora especially given that the perpetrators of this crime were attacking their victims and threatening to rape and kill them had it not been for the timeous arrival of someone else.

On foot, the police could have arrived in about 20 minutes, on bicycles in 10 minutes, and moreover, they still could have ‘hijacked’ a civilian vehicle to get to the scene that is if they really wanted to do their work.

Maybe we are being unfair to them but they should know that they are our police force and they account to us and we have a right to demand answers whenever we feel something is not right in their discharge of duty just the same way they demand answers from us when they feel we have broken the law.

All the public wants is a guarantee of security and appropriate responses when that security is threatened.

Private security companies around the city have standby vehicles marked Rapid Response and they are stationed strategically just in case of any distress call and surely the police can do better than that because they are supposed to protect even those security companies. We love our police and we acknowledge the difficult environment they are operating in but surely we cannot watch you fail the minimum and basic test of your profession.

Shame Isaki is a preacher, businessman and socio-political commentator. He can be contacted on 0773018662.