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Why police officers behave badly after regime changes

National
 Recruits at the Kenya Police Training College, Kiganjo, May 1957. [File, Standard]

What happens when law enforcers become lawbreakers? When Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua dressed down Nakuru County Commander Peter Mwanzo, for evicting some families from a disputed land without consulting, there was a national outcry.

He was echoing previous administrations' outrage. The police have always acted as instruments of regime protection from the time the Imperial British East African Company assembled a gang of men into what it called askaris in 1888 and professionalised them with imported trained officers from India.

A group of scholars, Oliver Vanden Eynde, Patrick Kuhn and Alexander Moradi explored what has been happening whenever there is a regime change -- they used the Kenya Police Service Registers to track Kenyan police officers over their entire career between 1957-1970.

After poring through individual records of 6,784 police officers who served between 1957 and 1970, they found that officers from ethnic groups associated with Kanu started committing offences at a significantly higher rate than non-Kanu officers.

They used Kenya Police Service Registers to track Kenyan police officers, enabling the researchers to record offences committed by each sampled officer.

In their paper, Trickle-Down Ethnic Politics: Drunk and Absent in the Kenya Police Force (1957-1970), the scholars concluded that the most prevalent crimes officers committed when their ethnic "kingpins" were in power were fighting, theft, discharging a rifle, allowing a prisoner to escape, corruption and creating a disturbance.

Although there had been a case of a police officer caught stealing a leopard skin, the most common offences are failure to attend duty and absence without leave (36 per cent), drunkenness (10 per cent), being dirty (8 per cent), and disobedience (8 per cent).

The most common punishment was paying a fine, which averaged about Sh16, and in extreme cases, detention.

According to the scholars, between 1957 and 1961, differences in offence probability between ethnic groups were indistinguishable but after Kanu came into power, the levels of crime among police officers hailing from Gema and Nyanza regions shot up. A similar change was detected in 1964 among officers from Rift Valley after Kadu merged with Kanu.

Interestingly, when Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was dropped from government, there was a "reversal of the pattern when an officer's ethnic group leaves power: the difference in offence probability between Luo and non-Kanu officers becomes negative and statistically indistinguishable from zero after 1965."

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