On Friday, June 25, 2021, Hennepin county judge Peter Cahil sentenced former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd, a civilian Black American, on May 25, 2020.
Last year, a jury found Chauvin guilty on three charges – second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter – related to Floyd’s death. Dereck Chauvin’s conviction was a powerful moment in modern American history and came on the weight of overwhelming and harrowing evidence against the ex-police officer.
“The fact that millions of Black Americans woke up on April 21, 2021, fearing that the jury would let Chauvin walk free reveals the trauma caused by years of impunity for a malicious element in policing in the United States,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu observed.
The jury that convicted Chauvin validated the notion that progress is possible in the fight against racism. There were tears of joy and celebration from a huge crowd that gathered outside a store where Floyd was murdered as the jury announced that it had found Chauvin guilty of all the three counts.
“What does justice even look like when a man loses his life this way,” Pulitzer-winning reporter, Nicole-Hannah Jones wondered.
The conviction of Chauvin gave hope to Black Americans whose lives have been marked with fear and violence for a very long time.
“On a sunny spring day, residents sitting on their porches, eyes trained to smartphones or listening intently to radio news, cheered. Cars honked, people whooped, neighbors hugged,” Washington Post reported.
“True justice requires that we come to terms with the fact that Black Americans are treated differently, every day. It requires us to recognize that millions of our friends, family and fellow citizens live in fear that their next encounter with law enforcement could be their last. And it requires us to do the something thankless, often difficult, but always necessary work of making the America we know more like the America we believe in” former President Barrack Obama and Michelle Obama said in a statement.
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This historic conviction of a white supremacist will not change the world, at least instantly. But it has definitely reminded the world that change is necessary, and inevitable.
Seen as the longest sentence a white police officer has ever received in American history for unlawful use of excessive force, the verdict, and the speed with which it was delivered, brought to light the power of collective outcry in the pursuit of justice.
The death of Floyd rejuvenated the Black Lives Matter campaign across the world. From Ontario to London to Vienna, people from all walks of life chanted those last words that Floyd said before his death: ‘I Can’t Breathe’. Different athletes including football players took a knee in solidarity with the fight against racism.
However, these developments were received quite differently in most parts of Africa, where the story of mankind began. While folks in the Americas and Europe, for example, identified with the marginalisation and racial abuse visited upon Black and Brown people in those countries, the perception in Africa was surprisingly different.
In Kenya, a small group of active citizens gathered outside the U.S embassy in Nairobi to protest against systematic racism that claimed the life of Floyd. The larger fraction of Kenyans stayed away: probably unconvinced that marching in the sun in the name of some abstract end is important.
To most Kenyans, Martin Luther King, Jr was out of his mind when he said injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
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Africans living in Africa ought to look at the issue of racism differently. If a white man living in a white neighborhood in Europe has the right conscience to speak out against racism, why should an African, who, because of his skin color, is more likely to experience racism compared to the White man, be slow to do so?
According to Pew Research Center, 75 per cent, 74 per cent and 54 per cent of Ghanaians, Nigerians and Kenyans respectively, would migrate abroad – where they’re likely to become victims of racist police violence – if circumstances allowed. As of 2017, according to United Nations, more than 51 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa migrants living in the U.S were from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya.
Additionally, between 2010 and 2017, the population of Somalian and Eritrean migrants living in Europe increased by 80,000 and 40, 000 people respectively. Due to high unemployment rates, low wages and high fertility levels, more Africans are expected to migrate to Europe and America. It’s therefore unwise for Africans living in Africa to sit back and watch from a safe remove – as it did in the latest Black Lives Matter campaign – as the rest of the world goes out of its way in denouncing racism and its merchants.
For some reason, Africans living in Africa are collectively unconscious of the phenomenology of racism and its foundation, perhaps because of weak national consciousness.
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Imagine a situation in which two visiting contemporary Americans experience police brutality during their stay in Kenya. One succumbs to injuries sustained from the violence while the other survives. The court finds the Kenyan police officers involved not guilty.
The American who survived takes to the street to protest against what is clearly a miscarriage of justice. A few Kenyans join them in the street. Eventually, the relevant officer is charged with murder and the state ordered to compensate their family. A few months later a Kenyan living in Kenya is assaulted by the police. There is a public outcry on Twitter. The Senate Security Committee subpoenas the Cabinet Secretary in charge of internal security to shed more light on the matter.
As usual, nothing much comes out of this exercise. “Look, we can fix this thing guys, let us go to the street,” one of the Kenyans who joined the American in protesting against police brutality tells his friends. He impresses upon his fellow Kenyans that by raising their voices and keeping the conversation on police violence alive they can actually give justice to victims of social injustices. But his friends dismiss his argument as delusions of a radical youth. They say he’s mad.
I am drawing this analogy from Plato’s Myth of the Cave. In his ingenious thinking, Plato invites us to imagine a cave in which some prisoners are bound so that they can look only at the wall in front of them. Behind them is a fire whose light casts shadows of various objects on the wall in front of the prisoners. Because the prisoners cannot see the objects themselves, they regard the shadows they see as the true reality.
One of the prisoners eventually escapes from the cave and, in the light of the sun, sees real objects for the first time, becoming aware of the big difference between them and the shadow images he had always taken for reality. The cave here represents the Kenyan state as we know it today; the world of sunlight represent consciousness; the prisoners represent Kenyan citizenry; while the escaped prisoner represents the Kenyans who took part in the protest.
In May 2020, a jury dropped murder charges against the three police officers involved in the murder of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was killed in a night melee between the police and her boyfriend. Only one officer was indicted following the murder. No charges were preferred against the other two officers, one of whom allegedly killed Breonna.
The verdict in the Breonna’s case elicited fury among Americans from all walks of life. In most states, protesters defied night curfews, took to the street to express their anger against yet another attempt by the system to justify murder of a Black American.
Racist police brutality in the United States raises important question on whether the American police are being used to enforce the imagined order of white supremacy. The development of American culture into a prejudicial Eurocentric society draws its roots from slavery, whose history informs police prejudice in America today.
Members of the Black Community have disproportionately suffered from extrajudicial killings in the more than 230 years that American democracy has existed. In 1913, for example, 51 Black Americans were killed extrajudicially: Only one White American died in a similar circumstance in the same year.
The political hierarchy established by the Americans in 1776 under the imagined order of the American story perpetuated the social hierarchy between Whites and Blacks. Social hierarchy established class consciousness which in turn created inequality. It remained self-evident, many years after the adoption of Declaration of Independence, that the equality of men did not include the people of color.
The “inalienable rights” existed only on paper, for the very people who signed the sacred document were themselves deeply involved in the unholy business of slavery. From the 16th to the 18th century, the European conquerors imported millions of African slaves to work on their mines and plantations in the wider American continent.
The extrajudicial killing of Breonna Taylor confirmed that police brutality in the United States is a question of systematic racism. In 2018, the homicide rate there was 35 per 1 million people.
“In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the United States fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years,” The Guardian observed.
In Africa, Nigeria, the most populated country and largest economy, leads with cases of police violence. In 2018, 841 homicide deaths were reported in the country. The #EndSARS campaign on Twitter in October-November 2020 was a worldwide protest calling for disbandment of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a unit of Nigerian police believed to be behind police brutality in Nigeria.
Iceland, a tiny Nordic Island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, had just 653 police officers against a population of 329 100; one police officer per 5o4 civilians. During its 71 years of existence, Iceland has reported a just single case of fatal shooting, in 2011. United States had had 686, 665 police officers in 2018 against a population of 328, 100 people; one police officer per 479 civilians.
There were 1, 439, 323, 776 people in China in 2020; world’s most populated country and the second largest economy in the world. Out of this population, only two million people were police officers. It means one police officer in China serves 720 civilians. Although little information on police violence in China is available, thanks to the personal coercive regime that runs it, it is safe to say that more Chinese die from car accidents every year than from police violence.
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Kenya had 101, 288 police officers in 2019, against a population of 52.57 million people; one police officer per 519 civilians. Although there is no reliable data on police brutality in Kenya, it’s estimated that hundreds of civilians are killed every year in extrajudicial circumstances. More than 20 Kenyans were killed between March and April 2020 by police officers.
In the United States where police killing is higher than in any other wealthy nation, police brutality is essentially a question of foundational racism that underlies American system. In Kenya, for instance, the roots of police violence can be traced from the colonial era and its attendant philosophies. Initially, the police force in Kenya was the reserve of the white settlers who were trained to arrest, torture, and incarcerate the masses without trial.
By persisting in their search for justice for victims of police violence, Americans have fulfilled their sovereign responsibility. Pressure from the public is known to encourage prompt investigations hence hastening administration of justice.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, is perhaps remembered most for his comments about governments and their use of force; the police and military. Jefferson said that governments are necessary ‘evils’: evils because they’re a use of force, and force has no morality or moral effect. They’re necessary because, until now, and maybe forever, a few men stupidly use force to injure others; and nothing but force will stop them.
Essentially, governments, by general consent, use force to protect the well-meaning majority from the evils of the corrupted minority. The question of police brutality in Kenya is a problem of a government unwilling to use force against individuals who use their positions of power, whether it’s a police officer, politician or a public servant, to injure and deprive the innocent majority. What we have in Kenya is a system that undermines the universality of justice, buoyed by a wrong pedagogy that marries the police, as a profession, with academic underperformance. The end result is a police service that’s underpaid, unappreciated and vulnerable to public contempt.
The Kenyan State, for example, has taken Max Weber’s definition of a state as a human community which successfully lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory quite literally, and out of context.
As British journalist Michela Wrong noted in It’s our turn to Eat: The Story of Kenyan Whistleblower, it’s surely no coincidence that so much power in Kenya today rests in the hands of seventy-and eighty year-olds who were impressionable youngsters in the years when the draconian colonial regulations made their traumatic impact on African lifestyles.
This constituency of independence elite absorbed vital lessons in how the legal system, the administration and the security forces could be abused to extract labour and resources from an alien land and its resentful people. “The first layer on the rubbish tip of Kenyan graft had been deposited,” she writes.
Let’s put this into context. Whereas ordinary citizens were punished for violating Covid-19 guidelines, politicians and powerful people in government breached the same laws with impunity. Why? Because political power, in most cases, means one has the privilege to interpret the law in the context of their choosing. People in positions of power engage in all manner of crimes ranging from corruption to manslaughter, with impunity. Some literally walk away with murder. The justice system only serves, mostly with the assistance of the police, to the extent that those in power want it to serve.
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As Kenyan Catholic priest and activist Gabriel Dolan noted in 2012 in an opinion article, Kenya has a disgraced police force that remains the greatest obstacle towards her democratization. What then ails the Kenyan police? Most often we rightly accuse the police of lacking humanity, but we rarely interrogate how they ended up losing it.
Any form of power corrupts by giving its holder some sense of immunity. Police, as an institution, don’t kill or maim. It’s an individual who can do that. The reason why majority of Kenyan police officers do not demonstrate faith in humanity in the course of duty can partly be ascribed to two reasons.
One, corruption: it’s public knowledge in Kenya that there’s run-away corruption in police training institutions. Trainees are reportedly asked to pay huge sums of money in exchange for admission. We believe, despite what happens, that the police are trained to discharge their duties professionally. But since they’ve been exposed to a morally depraved dispensation where power is associated with a sense of immunity from punishment, they develop an urge to dominate the people they’re supposed to protect, as a way of exercising their micro power.
Two, police in Kenya have somehow been neglected. The rank and file lives in deplorable conditions. A substantial number squeeze in small, metallic shanties with their families. They’re equally not paid as a professional police officer in a functioning system is paid. These are the same people we expect to be patriotic in their job whilst upholding basic human sensibilities that they have themselves been deprived.
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Cases of Police violence in Kenya take longer to be resolved largely because of lack of collective outcry. A citizenry that is slow in appreciating its responsibility is complacent to atrocities of the state.
We have allowed negative ethnicity to destroy our collective power since independence. We’re now determined to let silence – under which impunity thrives – to break our peoplehood. We decry police violence from a safe remove and leave it upon the families of the victims to look for substantive justice.
It’s not surprising that we didn’t follow up on the murder of 13-year-old Yassin Moyo, to expedite the administration of justice. It’s equally not shocking that anybody has come out strongly to demand justice for innocent civilians killed by the police during lockdown.
Between 2018 and 2020, Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) has investigated more than 5,000 cases of police violence and/or complaints. Only a fraction of these investigations have led to convictions.
There’s clearly lack of goodwill to address the issue of police violence in Kenya. To this day, nobody has been convicted for the brutal murder of Chris Msando, the former Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission ICT manager.
Even when Kapseret MP Oscar Sudi said “they” would soon reveal Msando’s killers, Kenyan authorities and the citizens acted as if Sudi was referring to some alien character in a gothic movie.
Take the case of the murder of seven-month pregnant Sharon Atieno on October 4, 2018. Sharon’s mutilated body was found at a thicket in Kodera forest in Homabay County. Two years later, the family of Sharon is still crying for justice. Similarly, University of Nairobi students Oscar King’ara and Paul Oulu were shot in full glare of the public by people dressed in police uniform on March 5, 2009 in Nairobi’s Kilimani area. More than eleven years later, these murders remain unresolved.
Until we collectively fulfill our sovereign responsibility, the state will always conspire with its internal operatives to perpetrate police violence. In that case the search for justice will remain a protracted process with little chances of success. If the conviction of Chauvin teaches us anything, it is that justice is served quicker when there is collective outcry, and judicial will to do justice.
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