Enhance community policing
Coast Regional Commissioner Rhoda Onyancha briefing the press on Shakahola Forest exhumation process.
Every time I watch the horror tales coming out of Shakahola, Kilifi County, I can’t help but recall a comment by a participant at a forum on neighbourhood security and safety held at a Nairobi hotel.
“When we were in school, we used to be told that serikali ina mkono mrefu (literally, the long arm of the law),” he said. “We thought the government, with its mkono mrefu, could sort us out so that we can spend the day peacefully and sleep comfortably at night. But with time, we have come to realise that, as individuals and as residents, we have a role in making our neighbourhoods secure.”
That was just before church faithful were found to have fasted to death, allegedly on the orders of a cult leader. More than 110 bodies have been exhumed and more graves marked for exhumation. How could such atrocity go unnoticed for so long? Why didn’t the “long arm of the law” get wind of it?
The “Shakahola massacre” is an indictment of community policing. Introduced in Kenya in 2015, Nyumba Kumi was motivated by the realisation that police needed to partner with communities to combat crime. There needed to be a good relationship between policing agencies and local communities. But that is still largely characterised by mistrust.
Said a 2019 study by Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (Kippra): “Various studies and reports have documented that interactions between policing agencies and communities have been repressive and punitive. This has made local communities loathe any encounter with officers from policing agencies.” It is a sentiment I hear a lot.
At the forum, security experts and community leaders were unanimous that the adversarial approach to law enforcement by police had undermined the effectiveness of community policing.
Tanzania, from where we borrowed the concept, has successfully embraced community policing as a shared responsibility between policing agencies and citizens. Only then can the venture succeed.
Mr Henry Ochieng’ is the CEO of The Kenya Alliance of Resident Associations. [email protected].
