Kenyan police should protect our values and ideals

There is no doubt that the police are exposed to grave danger in their fight against armed criminals. Ill-equipped, underpaid, uninsured, without appropriate laws, and without motivation, they literally place their unprotected bodies between us and the criminals who don’t hesitate to kill them. Worse, they perform their life and death duties in a very poisonous environment.

The criminals have loads of cash to buy their freedom from the criminal justice system. And there are allegations that where the diligent cop succeeds in convicting them in court, they soon buy their way out of jail to resume their unrelenting desire for death and destruction, determined above all else to kill that cop, unless the cop kills them first.

At the societal level the culture of death reins supreme. We never hesitate to lynch petty offenders. We have neither respect for life nor regard for the rule of law, and prefer to meet out vengeance rather than justice on those who wrong us.

Apparently death is cathartic for many of us. And we cheer in wild orgies whenever police execute outlaws. We line up to view their bodies. If we had our way we could proudly hang on our living room walls pictures of the triumphant cops with their feet on the dreadlocked heads of Mungiki in imitation of pictures of the senseless white hunters who decimated our wildlife.

The minority who believe in the rule of law and civilised and regulated punishment by the state have no room to represent their views in such a sick society, where extrajudicial police killings result inevitably from our readiness to urge our policemen to function as our protective executioners.

We remain solidly supportive of the executions and reject the argument that it is not the responsibility of police to take on the role of judge and executioner. We trot out counter arguments blaming the corrupt and inept judicial process, and comfort ourselves that the executions send clear messages to the criminals that if you kill us we will gladly kill you back.

We who control the media and make up ‘society’ only complain when the victims are not poor or powerless but look like us. But even then we don’t make the categorical point that any extrajudicial execution is a travesty of justice.

The shoot-to-kill policy is based on class. The police recognise this constraint. They know that we will let them do as they wish provided they avoid murdering middle-class people. And so, slum dwellers, squatters and those at the fringes of our society live lives that can suddenly be terminated by a police bullet fired at the whim of a disoriented or hired officer. No matter how many of them die unnecessary, unjust deaths, middle-class Kenya will refuse to protest or intervene, arguing falsely that there is no alternative to killing those who want to kill you.

Our tacit encouragement of the shoot-to-kill policy poses grave dangers to public safety. Once we give policemen the licence to kill, they can frame and murder their rivals to the rapturous acclaim of a credulous public.

Hence, Wako and Ali can resign, but that won’t change a thing unless we realise that whenever the police pull the trigger, they act at our behest – we give them the gun, the environment and the licence to kill. They are our assassins of choice, and until we change, there will be more police murders, more rapes and more injustice drowned in the chorus of middle-class approval.

We must reject this and fight crime through the rule of law. There is no room for making compromises between constitutional values and necessary crime-fighting measures to protect the nation. Suspects must face justice not revenge. The right to a fair trial is a fundamental human right that the state must guarantee everyone. Suspects are entitled to due process to ensure that innocent people are not summarily executed on the pretext that they are Mungiki. It is the duty of the judiciary to decide the appropriate punishment.

When the KNCHR condemns the police for becoming judge, jury and executioner it is failure of policing that is the issue, not the defence of criminals. Mungiki is a terrorist organisation – it is impossible to defend them. However, it is equally impossible to defend the summary execution of suspects by the police, as that amounts to making a false choice between our security and our values like liberty, justice, rule of law, and democracy, values that will be the hallmark of our greatness.

Like Barack Obama said of terrorists, the message the KNHRC is sending by condemning extrajudicial killings by the police is that we should pursue the struggle against violence and terrorism vigilantly, effectively and ‘in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals’ that are captured in our constitutional doctrines and in the international treaties we have signed. As Obama put it, we should not make ‘a false choice between our safety and our ideals’.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.