Enforcement officers with the Kenya Wildlife Service followed a two-week training course from 27 February to 10 March 2006 on how to prevent and investigate the poaching of wildlife.

The training was funded by Interpol’s first Ecomessage award, awarded to the Kenya Wildlife Service in 2005. The award included a grant, sponsored by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which can be used for either wildlife law enforcement training and/or equipment.

The training program took place at the Wildlife Service Training Institute in Naivasha, Kenya. The 32 participants included four Kenyan police officers, 26 officers from the Kenya Wildlife Service and two officers from the Lusaka Agreement Task Force.

Eight trainers, working as voluntary instructors, came from the US Fish and wildlife service, Israel Nature and Parks Authority, the Canadian wildlife service, the Interpol General Secretariat, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the New Zealand Wildlife Enforcement Group and the UK PAW wildlife forensics group (Partnership for Action against Wildlife crime).

Group of trainees working on an exercise during the course on criminal intelligence analysis

During the first training week all trainees attended courses on:

• Wildlife Law Enforcement intelligence and undercover operations - focused on the gathering of information, its processing and management and its use.
• Evidence/exhibits management - covered the elements of collecting and preserving evidence at crime scenes so that the evidence may retain its admissibility to be used as exhibits in prosecution.

During the second week the trainees were broken in two groups.

One group studied operational criminal intelligence analysis; how to be systematical in the review of data, how to form hypotheses about the specific criminality under consideration, how to analyze data and draw conclusions/recommendations that are useful for law enforcement operational needs and/or for long term strategic enforcement planning.

The second group studied the following:

• Anti corruption - advised wardens of the principal elements of the UN new convention against corruption and their responsibilities as wildlife law enforcement officers.
• Human rights - taught wardens the basic standards of human rights that must be observed by all law enforcement officers.
• Crime scene management – covering crime scenes in the bush and those in developed areas such as cities or ports.
• Wildlife forensics - covered special concerns that apply to the scientific consideration of forensic evidence that links a crime to a perpetrator.

The Ecomessage is a system for member countries to report environmental crime to the Interpol General Secretariat in Lyon, France, and the Ecomessage award was created to encourage countries to send messages to Interpol.