Find lasting solution to police killings

NAIROBI: As human rights defenders fight to end runaway police killings in Kenya, incidents of police killings are being reported in the United States of America with striking similarities, particularly in the manner in which the media cover the shootings.

“Four suspected thugs shot dead at City Cabanas, two pistols recovered”, went a headline of a Kenyan newspaper on August 11, 2016.

But it is the caption: 'Unarmed' Keith Lamont Scott Shot – Gun Recovered', and 'Oakland Police Kill Suspect Armed With Toy Firearm After Illegal Sideshow' that bear greatest similarity to what Kenyans were used to during the reign of former Nairobi Central Police Division Commander Geoffrey Mwathe.

At the height of Mwathe’s tenure, crime was high in Nairobi. During this time, the likes of Matheri, Rasta, Wanugu and their ilk made careers out of crime, prowling like hounds as they caused mayhem in the city and its environs.

And because of the sheer terror that these hardened criminals left in their wake, Kenyans gradually became joyful spectators whenever the criminals were cornered.

With each killing, and the descriptive media reporting that followed, crime and its reporting by the media took more than their rightful share of space and airtime.Obviously excited by the feat of officers under his command, Mwathe would always feel duty-bound to explain the drama as if he was always at the scene of the incident as it unfolded: “Acting on a tip-off my ‘mboys’ laid ambush...

"Then there was an exchange of fire. My mboys returned fire for fire. Two suspects were killed dead and a toy pistol was recovered,” he would say with heavy first-language interference”.

Hilarious as this may sound, it reveals a sad state of affairs. In almost every incident of police killing in Kenya, there is always a supportive section of the public, conniving media and police officers hunched to the thinking that killing suspects is the right thing.

Save for the recent killing of Willie Kimani and his two colleagues in which a police woman is among those charged with the offence, most police killers are male.

In almost every police station in Nairobi and other urban areas, there is always a police officer loathed and loved almost in equal measure by the local community and his colleagues as the no-nonsense crime buster who walks with a list of “criminals” to be killed as if being criminal is a permanent status that anyone who has ever engaged in crime walks with everywhere he or she goes. My understanding of the law is that even if one were criminally minded, always bent on doing that which is prohibited by the law, or accepted norms and standards of a society, one becomes a “criminal” only when he or she is caught committing a crime, or evidence is brought to bear on such criminal activity in a court of just laws that presume that he or she is innocent until proved guilty.

But when mere suspicion becomes the crime, then the rule of law, respect for human rights and dignity, and equality before the law that we subscribe to as a nation in Article 10 of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights take a back seat, giving room for a reign of terror of the kind we are being treated to by the police to take centre-stage.

As members of the public, we are all guilty of extra-judicial killings when we take the law into our own hands and beat suspects to death or cheer as police officers shoot them to death.

Extra-judicial killing is any action that takes away another’s life without the due process of the law and the rules of natural justice irrespective of whether it’s being done by the police or civilians.

As one who presided over the adoption of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution at the National Constitutional Conference at the Bomas of Kenya, I am acutely aware that a section of the public does not like the fact that unlike in the past, people accused of any crime, including murder and robbery with violence can now be released on bond.

That is as it should be as one is innocent until proved guilty, the burden of proof lying on the prosecutor. But this is not sufficient reason to mob lynch one merely because one is out on bond.

The Civil Society Reference Group would wish to see a situation whereby non-State actors concerned about increasing cases of extra-judicial killings sit down with State agencies to find a lasting solution to this problem. As pointed out, the media plays an important role in public perception of issues and should be part of this discourse.

A meeting of minds bringing together human rights organizations, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the National Police Service Commission, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, and the Commission on Administrative Justice would be the starting point for a multi-pronged inter-agency engagement on the issue.