EDITORIAL: Reform police, time is quickly running out for the change our country needs

Kenya’s police officers demonstrate just about every day that they are unfit for purpose.

If they are not collecting bribes to ignore crime, they are collecting cash from victims of crime with the promise of speeding up investigations.

The rot starts at the very top because every fish rots from the head.

Senior police officers, long accustomed to impunity and immune to accountability, believe that police officers need no serious rebuke or punishment. The police, in their view, should break the very law they enforce.

Nothing illustrates this disgraceful attitude more than the case of the Nandi youth assaulted while enjoying a night of pool.

Their pig-headed seniors, who operate without a care because the police are law unto themselves, decided that the culprits will be transferred to new posts instead of accounting for their illegal actions.

And even before the scandal of Nandi sinks into our collective consciousness, a reckless, trigger-happy Nairobi police officer fires a gun in a crowded estate street.

The result is a young fish trader lying dead in a mortuary with a family in deep unnecessary grief.

Time is quickly running out for the change our country needs because, by their very actions, they are fomenting a state of anarchy, the type we see in neighbouring Somalia.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.” —French philosopher René Descartes died on February 11, 1650