Outspoken human rights defender and priest Gabriel Dolan wrote in an opinion piece ten years ago that Kenya has a disgraced police force that “remains the greatest obstacle towards her democratization”. What is more worrying, he added, is that the Executive seems determined to control, manipulate and resist the comprehensive police reform envisaged in the constitution.
One could have dismissed Father Dolan’s argument in 2012 as impatient given that it was barely two years since the enactment of the 2010 Constitution, and that Kenya still had time to clean her act. But, ten years later, many will agree that the disgraced police service has contributed significantly to the collapse of the Kenyan dream.
The question that is rarely asked is what or who has facilitated the decay of the police force. We have a system that has historically discriminated against the police as a profession – in effect encouraging public disdain – and created a culture that identifies power with immunity from rule of law.
Also, Kenyan state, under the Jubilee administration to be precise, consistently undermined constitutionalism by trying to stifle independence of the judiciary. This act of totalitarianism created a sort of a bureaucracy within the larger constitutional system: it is only in bureaucracies where power is above the law whereby those who wield a significant amount of it determine how the law is enforced.
While digitization of the National Police Service is expected to address runaway corruption that has dogged the institution for many years, it is not the silver bullet. Without looking through the root cause of the problem, the underlying philosophy under which Kenyan police officers are trained, impunity, corruption and violence will still characterize the police force.
To paraphrase Chinua Achebe, the trouble with the Kenyan police service is simply a failure by the Executive to uphold principles of good leadership. There is nothing significantly wrong with the individuals recruited in the police force, or the uniform they wear or the technology in use. The problem with Kenyan police service is the unwillingness of the people who hold power to eradicate the endemic culture of state impunity that functions as the bastion of all forms of wrongdoings.
Principle of sound judgment dictates that we approach the problem of police violence, for example, on a case-by-case basis. However, immoral acts of a few police officers eclipse the good work that many of them do every day. The entire force is hence easily seen as disgraced.