AtMIS, the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, announced on Thursday that its police division had created guidelines to help the Somali Police Force (SPF) carry out community policing programmes to fight crime.
The standard operating procedures (SOPs) for community policing were created jointly with the SPF community policing directorate to help improve crime prevention, according to Alex Ndili, deputy coordinator of police reforms at ATMIS.
In a statement released in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Ndili stated that “crime prevention is the foundation on which the standard operating procedures are anchored and this is important to nation building.”
Ndili claimed that the creation of the SOPs will aid in the implementation of community policing in the federal member states and Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
According to him, the SOPs describe the functions of different community policing stakeholders, how to introduce community policing structures, how to form committees, and how to identify community challenges.
The rollout of SOPs, according to Somali Police Commissioner Abdi Hassan Mohamed Hijar, comes as the government decides to organise the populace to oppose militant group al-Shabab.
They must be eliminated if we are to advance economically, politically, or militarily, according to Hijar.