A physical head count of all police officers has been initiated to remove ghost workers from the payroll.
The National Police Service audit involves capturing biometric details of all officers from General Duty and General Service Unit.
The officers are required to present to divisional heads their certified copies of IDs, letter of appointment, certificate of appointment, KRA pin, and badge of service.
“We were asked to report to our divisional commanders for the registration,” one of the officers said. There are also concerns that there are men in uniform who have not undergone the required hiring procedure. Of concern too is the fear that a number of dead or retired officers are still on the payroll. Each officer will be uniquely identified by their payroll number.
The ongoing verification is the third, the last was done in 2016, which followed after another conducted in 2013. A number of officers told the Star in that the police service initiated the fresh listing to clean up its registers.
The service has been using a manual register to manage the officers’ data. NPS seeks to digitise its database of officers to make it easier so that the same can be updated from time to time.
In the first two headcounts, police officers just presented their documents. In the new system, their fingerprints and photos were also taken. The data will be fed into the centralised database for tracking purposes.
It will determine deployment and transfer cycles for all officers. “We filled a form capturing our personal details including place of origin,” another officer said. However, the process is yet to begin in disturbed areas such as Tot where a number of officers were deployed to fight cattle rustlers.
Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet pioneered the audit in his bid to clean up the service’s payroll.
Currently, there are about 100,000 police officers making Kenya just under the UN’s police to civilian ration of 1:450.