A few bad apples should not sully national police

Anyone who watched the Citizen TV exposé that revealed how rogue police officers promote crime by hiring out their operating gears — guns, uniforms, bulletproof vests, and handcuffs — to criminals for as low as Sh1,000, must have been horrified.

How can the very people whose job is to protect us be this callous, turning the notion of law enforcement upside down? How widespread is this horrifying problem? How high up in the ranks does the disease manifest itself?

These are some of the questions that immediately arose after watching the report.

In an effort to answer some of them, Director of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti held a live demonstration broadcast on TV in which the DCI presented a compelling case all may not be as glim and hopeless as the report showed.

The exposé came at a time when the DCI and other senior National Police Service officers are doing what they can to revamp the image and delivery of services.

“For a very long time in Kenya, police have been thought of as killers. See a policeman? You run. Nothing good could come of it,” the DCI is quoted in a previous interview, adding, “If we want the public’s confidence, we have to show them we are not all like that — we do work for them.”

To be sure, every Kenyan who has had occasion to interact with the police has a story to tell—and it is not a recent phenomenon.

I recall in the early 70s as I would ride with my now late father in his pickup truck to pick supplies from Kisii town, he dreaded seeing the police at their usual illegal tax collection points aka roadblocks.

It did not matter that none of the officers would bother inspecting my old man’s pickup truck knowing it was him, but his reaction nonetheless was the same each time: One of unnecessary anxiety just seeing them there.

These days I have been driven in a vehicle and have seen others flying by such illegal tax collection points by cars that the standard issue Land Rovers cannot ever catch up with. Petrified on one such occasion, I inquired from the person driving why he did not even slow down his reply was “don’t worry.”

I would later be told the real reason, but the police need not have these illegal tax collection points, neither should they be people the public should be afraid approaching or otherwise coming into contact.

Recent polls show more than half of Kenyans think police are a threat, not a service. It is against this backdrop that big honchos in the NPS decided to undertake serious efforts to improve the image and service delivery for this essential component of law enforcement and national security.

The exposé does not help in this endeavour but, as DCI Kinoti emphatically noted and reiterated, the men and women in police uniform are doing their jobs as they should, fully following the training and regulations that govern their conduct.

A few bad apples, who the DCI reminded are often found and prosecuted, cannot be reason to sully the rest of the good cops who are out there every day risking their lives to protect us all.

Kinoti has a point, and we should all back him up by appreciating the good job he and others in law enforcement are doing to keep us all safe from criminals — those who engage in violence as well as those commit economic crimes.

For its part, the government must do more in ensuring that officers are paid decently and given proper and decent housing or allowances to eliminate or reduce a need to supplement their income, sometimes in engaging in the illegal tax collection aka bribes.

Indeed, this should be a priority for the government and a ready source for money to accomplish this is using a small fraction of monies recovered or recoverable from proven or provable economic crimes.

Samuel Omwenga is a legal analyst and political commentator.