- However, according to data by Missing Voices, a platform by a coalition of civil society groups, police killed or disappeared some 219 people in 2021.
- Ipoa’s data is generated by complaints rendered to the agency while the Missing Voices compile their data from media reports and own reporting.
Image: SHABAN OMAR
An analysis of the 2021 report by the Independent Police Oversight Authority show that police killed some 169 people and enforced the disappearance of 28 people last year alone.
The two reports detail the work of the authority and the complaints it received from members of the public between January and June and July and December last year.
Of the numbers, a total of 123 deaths are categorised as death from police action, while 46 deaths are recorded as fatalities in police custody.
The report also indicate that the authority recorded 16 cases of enforced disappearance attributed to the police between January and June 2021.
12 of such cases linked to police officers were recorded in the remainder part of the year.
However, according to data by Missing Voices, a platform by a coalition of civil society groups, police killed or disappeared some 219 people in 2021.
Out of the number, 187 were as a result of police killings and 32 disappeared in police custody, it said.
Ipoa’s data is generated by complaints rendered to the agency while the Missing Voices compile their data from media reports and own reporting.
Missing Voices says this year it has recorded some 75 cases of killings or enforced disappearance allegedly done by police.
Out of the number, 72 were as a result of police killings and three disappeared in police custody.
These latest data have been collected for the period between January and June.
The 2021 Missing Voice report over the same period declared Pangani police station to be the most notorious in perpetrating human rights violation through extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearance.
The lobby’s report also link the station to alleged business extortion racket maintained by the station, as well as indiscriminate shooting and beating those suspected to be criminals.
They also claimed that officers from the station do frequent arrests on petty crimes.
But police top bosses have routinely dismissed the figures that they characterise as inconclusive and unreliable.
Police spokesman Bruno Shioso, when contacted by the Star in an earlier interview, termed the Missing Voices's report as subjective.
"The report and findings are subjective. Study didn't involve police. We aren't even privy of the methodology used," Shioso said.
Like his predecessor, Shioso complained that the statistics by the civil society were an indiscriminate mash up of data that did not differentiate the circumstance of the alleged death and who exactly carried it out.
He said the police have not engaged in any form of lawless killing whatsoever and whenever an officer committed an illegality, they are subject to the law.
"NPS [National Police Service] doesn't condone any abuse of powers. We don't also have any policy to any form of enforced disappearance."
(edited by Amol Awuor)