The police must protect civil liberties

I recall with clarity a not too pleasant conversation I had sometime in 2006 with the then Internal Security Minister John Michuki at Harambee House. This was meant to be an ordinary session on the Police Reforms Task Force where I was serving alongside Maina Kiai.

At the time, Kiai was chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and Deputy Director of Kenya Human Rights Commission. I represented the civil society at the task force.

By design, the task force was chaired by the designate minister.

It must be known that Maina and I had had a rather polemic relation with Cabinet minister Chris Murungaru because we had asked that the issue of procurement by the police be discussed by the task force. This is a matter that had been opposed by Murungaru and former Secretary to the Cabinet Francis Kimemia, who was an under-secretary in the Ministry of Internal Security at that time and secretary to the task force.

We decided that the two most important matters that we would settle for as police reforms at the time were going to be ‘democratic policing’ (expressed through community policing) and dismantling regime police through the establishment of a civilian oversight authority.

As the work of the task force unfolded, Mr Kiai served in the sub-committee that was mandated to discuss and define the establishment of a civilian oversight authority. This team proposed that there should be a National Police Service Commission (NPSC) that would have the role of human resource management and ensuring that police are accountable to the law, the public and to their own standing orders.

I on the other hand was a member and chair of the community policing sub-committee. Our committee suggested community policing as an avenue of policing that would assist in transforming the Kenya Police from a force to a service.

So luring were our suggestions that even before we had completed the guidelines for community policing, President Mwai Kibaki insisted that community policing must be launched without delay as a ‘quick win’.

In our meeting, Michuki had expressed the President's desire to launch the community policing component. But as chair to the sub-committee, I raised concern that I wanted discussed by the entire task force before we proceeded.

I posed the question; “Mr Minister, you have been reported by a section of the media to have instructed Mr King’ori Mwangi (who was the Nairobi Provincial Police Officer) to either get the guns from the suspects or he gives them bullets. Don’t you think this instruction is inconsistent with our quest of insulating police from illegitimate political interference and promotes extrajudicial execution?” The room went quite as Kimemia whispered to the minister.

Then the minister asked me, “... who are you?” I did not speak. It was Maina Kiai who responded and reiterated that what I was raising were legitimate questions. After that Michuki looked at me straight in the eyes and roared back “...Mr Human rights, allow us to do our work."

That conversion should instruct us in the current context why, although we have institutions such as the NPSC and Ipoa, the police remain a force that uses extrajudicial execution as a method of policing.

I think that we must insist and add to our menu of police reforms the role of police in protecting civil liberties. It is noticeable that both the NPSC and the current executive leadership of the police, through Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery, tends to see the role of the police as offering coercive security and protecting property.

If the police were to protect civil liberties despite their zeal to serve the interests of the regime, they would have some sort of restrain from the current practices of trampling on civil liberties.