Democratic Policing in Mozambique - Challenges of Training for Professionalisation

Mozambique introduced a democratic system of government after the first elections in 1994. Before that, an almost two-decade long civil war had a devastating impact on infrastructure, the economy, and an already weak state. Democracy, as Baker put it, had to be built from scratch and policing completely reformed and reorganised, due to their military nature and organisation during conflict years. This article draws on the conceptual framework for democratic policing developed by Muntingh et al to gain a better understanding of the state of policing in Mozambique and to identify the main challenges towards democratic policing. According to Muntingh et al, democratic policing refers to the police’s abidance to the rule of law, accountability of the police, and procedural fairness by the police in service of the public. Muntingh et al identified nine dimensions of democratic policing. These dimensions (Figure 1) are linked and to some extent have causal and hierarchical relationships, even though in practice they are often intertwined, inter-dependent and frequently mutually reinforcing. As shown in Figure 1, the nine dimensions are: 1) knowledge; 2) effectiveness and efficiency; 3) ethics and accountability; 4) rights-based; 5) police as citizens; 6) objectivity; 7) responsivity; 8) empathy; 9) trust.