Rethink push to deploy military in a purely police function

The Standard

President Uhuru Kenyatta’s creation of a third command of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) in an effort to include the military in the fight against organised crime in Nairobi should send shivers down the spine of every Kenyan.

On the face of it, the reasoning behind the formation of the Nairobi Metropolitan Command of the military might sound reasonable to a people frustrated by repeated police failures to combat serious crime.

Indeed, the statement from the Defence ministry seeks to justify the unprecedented action by saying the new command was necessitated by the current security threat in the city, including terrorism, drug trafficking, proliferation of small arms and crime among others.

Unfortunately, the explanation misses the point that police and military roles are different and not necessarily even complementary.

The primary function of a police officer traditionally is to “keep the peace.’’ Those the officer suspects to have committed a crime are treated as just that – suspects. Police officers are expected, under the rule of law, to protect the civil liberties of all citizens – even the “bad guys”.

For law enforcement, a suspect in custody remains innocent until proven guilty. Moreover, police officers operate among a largely friendly population and have traditionally been trained to solve problems using a complex legal system; the deployment of violence is an absolute last resort.

Soldiers by contrast are trained to identify people they encounter as belonging to one of two groups – friend or foe – and they often reach this decision surrounded by a population that considers a soldier an occupying force.

After this identification, a soldier’s mission is stark and simple; kill the enemy, or “try” not to kill the non-enemy. Indeed, the Soldier’s Creed declares, “I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of Kenya in close combat.” That is a far cry from the police officer’s creed that expects its adherents to “protect and serve”.

The huge difference between the hiring, training and, ultimately, roles of police and military officers means that one cannot, and therefore, should not, be substituted for the other. The Westgate Mall attack and the subsequent failed attempts to capture the terrorists should have underlined this better than anything else could have done. It is a pity that it does not seem to have accomplished that.

Although there are plenty of anecdotes about rotten police officers, there are plenty of good ones. And in any case, bad police officers are a product of bad policy, which leads to bad systems. Loaded with bad incentives, these bad systems inevitably produce bad police officers.

The inevitable result is that potentially good officers do not enter the force in the first place, or they become frustrated and leave police work or, worse, they go rogue. At best, these officers will have unrewarding, unfulfilling jobs.

Despite the frustration, the onus is on the political leadership to keep an eye toward identifying and changing policies that allow bad people to become police officers in the first place and that allow their “badness” to flourish in police work.

Sidelining the police and deploying the army to do police work is certainly the wrong way to go about fighting crime. There is no evidence this policy has worked anywhere – not even in the highly militarised dictatorships that have dotted the world from time to time.