Our police officers are allergic to technology

A few days ago, I asked in a social media forum: “Does the Inspector General (IG) of Police Hilary Mutyambai know the number of people who spent last night in a village police station without calling the officer in charge?”

The answers were comical and ridiculous, expressing negative perception about police and technology. Some were categorical that in many stations, even the officers in charge never get to know the number of suspects thrown in the cells.

Indeed, many innocent souls spend hours in cells across the country without being booked in the Occurrence Book (OB) and the cases never get to leave the stations.

Early this month, the IG launched a digital OB at Kasarani Police Station in Nairobi, in line with the directive by the Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i to streamline the management of reports in police stations.

The IG said the digital OB will ensure accountability and transparency. The entries are a permanent record that cannot be edited, hence eliminates manipulation of the OB by rogue police officers. He said the project will be rolled out to other areas next year.

Technology in the entire police service should and ought to be the game changer. And it must be made simple. At the click of a button in Nairobi, the IG and any other officer should be able to read the names, ages, sex and other bio-data of every suspect booked at Munyange Police Station in Othaya, Nyeri County. There must never be a compromise in that flow of data on crimes and criminal suspects.

The IG should be able to know why every suspect arrested and detained in a station was released without being prosecuted and put the officers responsible to account. But is your ordinary police officer interested in technology? Is the digital OB at Kasarani Station fully running?

A closer look at the Kenya Police Service reveals an institution that has peculiar resistance to technology, even the most basic. In this age and era, you still find hand-written charge sheets brought to court by police officers.

Yet in other jurisdictions, modern technology is the tool that sniffs and deals decisively with crime. A suspect can escape from custody in one station in Kenya, get arrested for a different offence in another station, be tried and convicted without establishing that the two stations were actually dealing with one and the same person.

It justifies the argument that criminal activities in any society are committed by a very small group that manage to beat the system and repeat it over and over again. Many times, ignorance of the law that facilitates use of technology among some of our officers can be nauseating.

For instance, Section 36 of the Traffic Act, laws of Kenya requires every driver to produce a driving licence or provisional driving licence (DL) on demand by a uniformed police officer. Section 36(2) provides that a DL includes any other evidence that can prove you have a valid licence.Through a smart mobile phone, any police officer can get that “other evidence” from the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) portal.

Unfortunately, many traffic officers are yet to accept that reality and embrace the simple technology. The traffic department is still littered with officers who always insist on the physical DL.

And their ears are ever blocked to anything touching on the NTSA database. Perhaps the law is not very helpful in this area, but many courts now interpret validity of a DL to include what is contained in the NTSA portal. Other judicial officers are still indifferent.

Additional cases

The result is that you can be convicted for failing to carry a physical DL in one court and another person acquitted of the same offence in the next court. In a crackdown on traffic offenders during Christmas season, all police stations were under strict instructions to email the number of traffic offenders arrested, the nature of the offence and the outcome of the cases.

This appeared exhausting and a bother to traffic officers who had to get enough cases for the official records and additional ones for their pockets.

Tracking down mobile phone calls and handsets and even the user’s location is now a commonplace technology. Yet in Kenya, that service by criminal investigators is offered selectively, discriminatively and in small amounts like fine wine.

Many criminals are enjoying their lives and times out there because the police officers entrusted and facilitated with the technology to track them down do not bother, and when they do, they must be motivated with bribes.

Technology is welcome. But individual police officers must be isolated and pushed to accept technology and made accountable. This is one area in which the Judiciary should stand at the very end of the justice system and get the law enforcers to comply. And everyone shall be a winner.

 Mr Thuku is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya