Someone must stop executions by police!

Runaway crime is amongst the top concerns and fears of anyone living in Kenya.

It therefore stands to reason that the public must support without reservations the dangerous work of those charged with ridding society of carjackers, robbers, muggers, rapists, kidnappers and other criminal deviants who have no regard for the law and none for human life.

However, the Kenya Police Service wins itself no admirers when in its purported efforts to enforce the law, it resorts to breaking those same laws.

The police cannot fight crime by becoming criminals themselves.

But that is what they have become as captured elsewhere in this newspaper, with graphic images of brazen extra-judicial execution in full view of pedestrians and motorists on a busy Nairobi street.

The heart-rending images captured on Wednesday by a horrified civic-minded citizen show plainclothes policemen carrying out the killings right in the midst of morning traffic on the busy Lang’ata Road. (Read: Kenyan police execute three men point blank)

It was not an exchange of fire; nor by any-stretch of the imagination could it pass as lawful use of lethal force.

The victims posed absolutely no threat because they had clearly been subdued. They had surrendered and were lying helplessly on the ground. They clearly were not attempting to flee, resist arrest or turn on the officers.

Instead of arresting them, the officers decided to turn judge, jury and executioner. They shot their victims in cold blood, uncaring that there were many watching eyes.

After the deed had been done, the officers even had the temerity to turn their guns on journalists who arrived on the scene and threaten to despatch them in a similar fashion.

Those three victims do not depict just the unlawful actions of a few rogue policemen; they depict the rottenness of an entire force that has been overrun by criminal elements.

No to cosmetic reforms

Action must be taken, and taken fast. This is an instance where the police cannot be entrusted with the task of investigating themselves; so an impartial outside agency must be brought in to conduct professional investigations that will bring the killers to justice.

Over and above catching and prosecuting the individual officers who committed the terrible deed, the enquiry must expanded to examine afresh the whole culture of extra-judicial killings and other criminal activities within the police services.

Such an impartial investigation under an independent Commission of Inquiry would be the basis on which police reform is pegged, not the present cosmetic reforms that are not geared towards substantive and long-lasting change.

That change must include removing from the force, and subjecting to justice where necessary, all officers from top to bottom who have been involved in crime, or are otherwise found incorrigible and resistant to change.

Special attention must be paid to bringing to account senior officers who have nurtured a culture that has bred a service run amok.