Police need special identification cards

When police officers are not in uniform, they are indistinguishable from the average man in the street. This poses a major challenge to the public and officers in mufti that must be addressed to help the war on crime. Evidence of this is clear in the frequent cases of robberies involving fake police officers. The Kenya Police Service should consider introducing identification badges for officers from special squads or the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, who work in civilian clothing and unmarked cars.

Unlike uniformed officers, plainclothes officers have no foolproof of identifying themselves. Criminals know this and take advantage of this to kidnap people in broad daylight by passing themselves off as police merely because they possess guns, handcuffs or two-way radios. Plainclothes officers, meanwhile, abuse their anonymity to commit crimes – a fact suggested by the recent prosecution of Flying Squad officers. In other cases, officers have had to flee from the public when mistaken for criminals. 

To avoid such problems, the force should introduce forgery-proof identification badges, perhaps similar to those used in other jurisdictions.

These should then be widely publicised allowing citizens to demand and get identification of any person in civilian clothing purporting to arrest them. Without this safeguard, anyone that can get hold of police equipment can pass themselves off as an officer.