By Kaddy Jawo
French National Police began a 12-day training of forty (40) Police Intervention Unit (PIU) officers including Platoon and Section Commanders of The Gambia Police Force on crowd control. These security personnel are benefiting from the training which involves taking modules on discerning critical operational situations, analyzing the environment and giving proper orders to troops, the National Security Advisor, Col. (Ret.) Momodou Badgie.
Gambia’s Office of National Security (ONS) said the training on “public order tactical applications” is a part of the country’s broad ongoing security sector reforms.
This is the first training to be undertaken by the French-Gambia Cooperation towards applying the principles of good governance to security provision, management and supervision in a democratic context.
The training is very important for PIU officers… the laws of The Gambia forbid the security excessive use [of] force,” Badgie said.According to him, the Principles for Security Sector Governance include effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, transparency, responsiveness and the rule of law.
Officials believed given the fact that the operating staff in a unit perform according to the orders they receive from their chiefs/platoon heads, it was important that the first step of a long-lasting French training program starts with effective exercise of operational command.
Thus, the first week of training focuses on the acquisition and the validation of the basics in order to perform the elementary maneuvers, movements and tactics, while the second week will focus more on operational reasoning and command. The training is very important for PIU officers, noting that the laws of The Gambia forbid the security excessive use of force.
The police around the world are prepared to tackle all kind of challenges but the most important of all is how to respond in terms of riot. The government believes that these two weeks training will therefore augment the skills of the PIU officers of The Gambia Police Force in an on-going process of cooperation between the French National Police and The Gambian Police Force.
Officials believe that the support by the French Government to The Gambia Police Force will continue extensively. They hope that in the near future there will continue to undertake more reform programs in the security sector.
The Gambia’s PIU is notorious for brutally cracking down on peaceful protesters and had used life ammunition leading to the killing of several protesters—the most recent, in June 2018, in Faraba Banta which led to the killing of three environmental activists.