Abstract
The rediscovery of limited-purpose wildlife police units in East Africa—Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—has slowly but steadily gained attention of criminologists and law enforcement experts in Africa. This article traces some strands of this development. It does this by critically reviewing the literature on both the regular, traditional policing, and the special-purpose wildlife police units. The review clearly demonstrates several criminological concerns such as limited utilization of concepts, theories, and paradigms as gleaned from the literature on regular, traditional policing and special-purpose wildlife police units; unavailability of relevant information and data in the gray areas; and suggests the adoption of community policing concept as a solution to this problematic situation for a comprehensive police reform.