Police officers, junior and senior, have an exaggerated and nauseatingly delusional view of their sense of self-importance.
Only in September last year Deputy Inspector General Gilbert Masengeli ignored court summons seven times, leaving judge Lawrence Mugambi with no option but to slap him with a six-month jail term that was later quashed after he showed up chastened.
And sadly only four months later, Inspector General Douglas Kanja and DCI boss Mohammed Amin have shown the very attitude Masengeli displayed much to the frustration of the courts and the general public.
We would like to remind police officers, regardless of rank, that court orders are sacrosanct.
They must be obeyed whether they feel or believe that the order was inappropriate.
The courts happily provide an avenue for everyone to be heard.
The police force, of all our institutions, should be the last to trash and disobey the law. It’s the very tenet on which their role is anchored.
Again like the Masengeli case, Kanja and Amin are required in court in relation to the abduction of six social media activists kidnapped days before Christmas and set free on Monday.
Court orders are guard rails to keep a society from the state of nature in which life is nasty, brutish and short.
HISTORICAL QUOTE
“It is a well–known fact that the greater a
man is the less he has on his door–plate.”
KAREL ČAPEK
The Czech writer and critic was born on January 9, 1890.
