As he takes over as the acting Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police in charge of Administration Police, Noor Yaarow Gabow becomes the first Kenya Police Service officer to head AP.
The former Senior Assistant Inspector General of Police’s appointment will thaw the relationship between the regular police and AP who often clash owing to their different mandate and training.
Gabow takes over from Samuel Arachi who served in the defunct provincial administration in various capacities before rising to DIG.
The former administrator seemed to enjoy good relationship with senior officials in the Office of the President even as he attempted to detach AP from the OP bureaucracy.
A graduate of the UK based International Academy Bramsh of the National Police Improvement, Gabow is expected to transform AP into a more professional outfit.
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The senior officer who has worked to establish working police services in troubled locations around the world will definitely seek to transform the AP.
“Gabow is a good officer whose ideas and direction are likely to transform AP if he does not encounter resistance because he comes from a sister service,” a senior officer who has worked with him said yesterday.
Gabow, who holds a Criminology degree has come a long way from 1991 when he joined KPS as a cadet before rising through the ranks.
He served as Officer Commanding Parklands police station where he stopped the routine weekend robberies at the Kenya Commercial Bank Sarit Centre branch in Nairobi.
Concerned by the bank robberies Gabow and his officers locked up bank staff after one such incident and recovered millions of shillings that had supposedly been stolen.
A guard had confessed to snatching the money bag from the fleeing robbers and threw it into the bank shortly before police arrived but the managers insisted that the thugs had fled with the loot.
The robberies stopped after three of the suspects were pursued and killed in a coffee plantation in Ruaka.
From then on Gabow’s star shone taking him to deputy OCPD Gigiri and later OCPD.
He proceeded to the UN where he spent five years first in a UN Mission in Sierra Leone and Bosnia before proceeding to New York to head the Africa desk.
He returned to work at Vigilance House in the Planning department before he was in September 2017 redeployed as the Commandant Kenya Police College, Kiganjo where he served until his appointment on Friday.
Arachi’s five year tenure at the helm of AP had come to an end and there had been hopes that it would be renewed.
Under his watch, the AP lost highest number of officers to bandit attacks while the infighting between regular police and AP heightened in the sharing of transport, and housing resources and in the awarding of ranks.
Arachi at one time lived at the Coast where he led an operation to rout out terrorists after the Mpeketoni attacks in which many people died.
Arachi’s predecessor and now State House Comptroller Kinuthia Mbugua spearheaded strategic papers that transformed the AP into a professional service.
