NAIROBI,Kenya – When police sergeant Ahmed Rashid was caught on camera in 2017 allegedly brutally gunning down two unarmed young men outside a busy shopping complex in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighbourhood, a chain reaction was immediately set off.
In one corner, the utter disbelief of the horrific events that were captured in the viral video was initially unfathomable, many believing the video was doctored as it it was unthinkable that an officer of the law, sworn to protect and serve innocent civilians would ultimately commit the unforgivable.
In another corner, despite national outrage to arrest and charge Rashid with murder, the law, hailed as bending to no man’s will, seemingly appeared to be fickle as Kenyans would have to wait for at least close to six years for him to be formally charged with with two counts of alleged murder.
Recently, the missing voices coalition launched its annual report on the state of policing in Kenya. The report, which is a labour of commitment from about 17 civil society organizations documented heinous crimes committed by police officers in 2023, including what was thought to be a thing of the past,at least according to the government: extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.
According to data from the report,118 people were killed by police while 10 were forcefully disappeared in 2023. Although data revealed that there was a 9.2 % decreases compared to 2022, there is growing concern that police have changed the ways and methods they use to carry out such horrific crimes.
For instance, it is increasingly becoming clear that men aged 19 to 35 years, working within the informal sector such as taxi drivers, bodaboda riders and even students are the ones mostly targeted by the alleged killer cops.
The police according to the report are said to be using mobs and informers to kill suspected criminals. Human rights monitors have managed to document accounts where police instigate mobs to kill individuals and claim the mobs couldn’t be dispersed. Informers are further said to be giving out names and whereabouts of the suspects – they are then sent to kill them, execution style using unregistered firearms.
This shocking development has now prompted the missing voices coalition to conduct further studies on emerging trends being used to kill suspected criminals in order to enable human rights organizations better monitor and confront these emerging realities.
Worryingly at the center of these horrific incidents, the country’s capital Nairobi is still said to be the leading in the number of police killing incidents at 46. Kisumu recorded 9 with the number being attributed to protesters being felled by police bullets during the nationwide protests on the cost of living.
The bulk of the killings however occurred during police anticrime operations. To put it into perspective, 58 people were killed in anti-crime operations, 45 in anti-riot operations, seven were killed in unclear circumstances, five in gender based violence related incidents, one in anti-terror operations while two were killed in anti-poaching operations.
There are however glaring questions as to the reason behind the decrease in the number of killings brought about by anti-terror operations, with human rights defenders saying either the government has implemented a softer approach to dealing with terror related cases or they have found discrete ways of executing victims that do not raise alarm in the wider public.
Amidst all this, justice is still yet to be served as very few police officers implicated of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances are yet to be arrested or prosecuted. In fact, just five police officers, those involved in spats with loved ones that ended in deaths were arrested or prosecuted in 2023.
In a bid to end this menace once and for all, the missing voices coalition has made several recommendations to the various duty bearers within the criminal justice system including the national assembly to enact a law on enforced disappearances or amend existing legislation to criminalize enforced disappearances while providing recourse and reparations for victims and their families.
In order to encourage witnesses to engage the criminal justice system, the judiciary has been urged to expedite and finalize cases of enforced disappearances and police killings as well as prioritize the need fort law reforms on sanctions for government officials’ failure to obey court orders for production in cases of habeous corpus cases.
The office of the director of public prosecutions has also been urged to expedite cases of extrajudicial killings in court and work with the judiciary to provide a realistic timeline for when cases will be resolved.
Amidst all this we are reminded that for this battle to be won,the good of the people is the greatest law.
The writer, Shukri Wachu is a Journalist and Communications Officer at ICJ Kenya. This article was first published on the Daily Nation.
