Way back when, the '90s' actually, I had a classmate whose father was a tyrant. Like all hormonal teenagers, he did not take his father's tyranny well. He rebelled. His rebellion took many forms, but the most satisfying must have been when his father would hand over hard cash for school fees and he treated us to chips, chicken, vodka, smokes and weed. So his father did the only hing that seemed to sensible at the time: he dumped the poor boy at the nearest police station and, after explaining his dilemma, asked the kindly officers to straighten out his son. Three days later, he was well and truly straightened out. I think the swelling and the bruising went down after three weeks.
I have glanced once or twice at #DeleteSchoolGirlPhoto and I have only one question to ask: what have you guys been smoking? The Kenya Police and the Administration Police are not the National Police Service Nzamba Kitonga and his cohorts conjured up in the draft Harmonised Constitution or the one we promulgated five years ago. Far from it. They are hidebound, reform-resistant, male-dominated, male-oriented, colonial weapons of mass destruction.
You and I have an appreciation for the phrase, "A child in conflict with the law." They don't. To them, if you can chew gum and walk at the same time, you are a threat and a threat to be neutralised. Harshly and quickly. So it comes as not surprise that a woman police officer lifted up the skirt of a schoolgirl in conflict with the law, yanked down her panties and allowed a police photographer to photograph the girl and violated her modesty. You see, she is not a woman police officer; she is simply a police officer. You can be sure that unless we make a big enough fuss about this, she will remain unpunished and the Kenya Police will carry on as they have since 1906.
Do you remember the phrase "police reforms?" Me neither. These revolved around the integration of the Kenya Police Force and the Administration Police as well as eradicating corruption in the police. Laudable goals. Completely worth the wait when they come through. Totally miss the point of reforms in the first place.
We have been policed, more or less, in the same way since 1906. Even with nods to the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms, policing has not undergone significant changes other than the re-designation of the Special Branch as the National Intelligence Service. The police in Kenya exists solely to keep the President and his loyal satraps safe from us, the people. Not even children are to be treated with kid gloves; after all, mtoto wa nyoka ni nyoka, na Wakenya wote ni nyoka.
It seems that police training requires suspects and detained persons to be brutalised. There was absolutely no requirement to search the child in the presence of male police officers. There was absolutely no reason to record the search in film. There was categorically absolutely no reason to circulate the photos of the child among the officers present. Now those photos are out in cyberspace, being forwarded from one paeophiliac to another, permanently making the most cruel act against a child available to the most depraved people in the world. All because our police does not give two shits about the safety of the people but the security of the state.
The capacity of the Kenya Police to shock is no longer shocking. If you are shocked, perhaps it is because you live in Utopia, where the State loves you, the police protect you, the government pretty lets you do whatever you want, and your children are being educated and mentored by the best in the world. I live in the real Kenya. It is a hostile place where a misstep means that my daughter's nude photos will be shared by the police with the world.
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