Police force struggles to solve high profile cases

By Kipchumba Some

The investigative arm of the police force has been censured following the failure to successfully solve high-profile cases that have rocked the country in the recent past.

Once considered one of the best in Africa, the Criminal Investigative Department, CID seems a pale shadow of its former all-powerful menacing self of the years gone by.

In historical sense, it has been plagued by decades of neglect by successive governments. In recent times, it has had to content with inconsistency in policy, bureaucracy as well as ethnicity.

Nearly a month after the Uhuru Park blasts, which claimed six lives, police officers are yet to crack the case.

This week Police Commissioner Mathew Iteere said the force did not have any leads on the case raising fears that it might peter out like others before it.

Before that, the Government had lost a case against constable Edward Kirui accused of killing two people in Kisumu during post-election riots.

Last year, it lost another post-poll related case, that of five people accused of burning 35 people at a church in Eldoret on New Year’s Eve of 2008.

But that was not the only case that defeated the CID to crack.

No one has ever been arrested in connection with the August 2007 mysterious blast outside the 680 Hotel that killed one person.

The task of investigating these and other criminal incidences falls with the CID branch of the police force, and it is largely to them that blame goes when cases are thrown out for lack of evidence.

Police Spokesman Eric Kiraithe said the force is doing the best with the little resources it has. "It is not about why we are failing, but what we accomplish with the resources we have, no other nation can."

Mr Kiraithe says the CID should not be perceived separately but that the whole police force should be scrutinised as an entity.

For years, the police force has been neglected lot. Successive governments did little to modernise it. Its ranks were drawn from the least educated in society and no one bothered to equip it.

Poor salaries and poor housing compounded its problems. Yet it’s under these circumstances that the force, especially the CID, was still expected to crack crime that is increasingly becoming sophisticated in light of technological advance that criminals have taken advantage of.

So as criminals took advantage of technological advances to make their work easier, methods used to investigate and prevent crime remained the old cloak and dagger affair.

Shortage of equipment was among key concerns raised by a commission led by retired South African judge Philip Ransley.

It states: "Police services do not have adequate technological and logistical capacity. It should be reviewed to establish the exact needs and specification to bring policing to international standards."

Part of those reforms came to pass this week when the Government awarded the 40,000 plus officers a 28 per cent salary raise.

But junior officers have considered the increase as "too little".

The police force lacks a forensic lab, fingerprinting and DNA equipment and enough resources to conduct proper investigations.

Courts blamed

Plans to construct a Sh1-billion forensic science laboratory evaporated in the heat of the Anglo-leasing scandal of 2004. Nothing has been heard of the project since then.

Ideally every police station should be equipped with finger printing equipment. But that is far from the reality here. The only finger print machine is at the CID training school.

As it happened in the Kirui case, courts are blamed when suspects, who in the court of public opinion are guilty, walk out free. Little thought has been given to the quality of police investigations.

A former high court judge who requested anonymity, said poor investigations were mainly responsible for the loss of high profile cases.

"More often than not, they (police) present evidence with glaring loopholes and expect you to convict suspects. It cannot happen that way. You have no choice but to let the suspects free."

In certain cases, especially which involve explosives, the police always invite foreign investigators to help. Due to historical ties, Israeli agents, the British MI5 and South African police have helped with some cases.

"We bring these people to aid investigations and enrich our experiences. But from experience, they are not any better than us.

A senior inspector, likewise speaking on condition of anonymity, also revealed that the CID is suffering from inconsistency on policy and crippling bureaucracy.

"It takes a lot of time before decisions are made and in that time, cases and evidence has been lost. Policy should make it easier, not harder, to investigate crime as soon as it occurs. But this is not the case here," he said.

He added that the curse of ethnicity, which continues to eat Kenya’s social fabric, has not spared the force.

"In certain cases officers refuse to investigate members of their ethnic group or do it poorly," he said.

Despite the desperate need to equip the force with modern tools and new crime-fighting technologies, funding remains woefully low. In this year’s Budget it was allocated Sh33.2 billion, a meagre increase of Sh100 million from last year’s.

Despite the mountain of challenges it faces, Kiraithe insists the CID is still one of the best in Africa.