Last week witnessed two major public uproars.  In the first, the public condemned an ugly incident where a woman was accosted by suspected boda boda riders within the city after she had been involved in a road accident with another road user. Being law-abiding, she stopped at the scene as the law demands.

And as a good diplomat, working with the UN family, she promptly called to inform her employer. This is a standard procedure the UN demands of its employees involved in situations requiring police action.

By this time, the riders had already encircled her car and condemned her as being rude. Fearing for her safety, she attempted to escape from the mob.

This further enraged the riders who pursued her, catching up with her in the traffic where she was mobbed; her dignity, decency and personal space violated; and assaulted. She was also robbed of valuables before officers rushed to her rescue. 

There was an instantaneous outburst as the public turned the heat on the riders and demanded the long overdue sector regulation.

The government did not disappoint. President Uhuru Kenyatta swiftly called a crackdown and police swung into action. 

Most Kenyans were supportive of the move, including some within the boda boda industry. But being an electioneering period, others saw an opportunity, which birthed the second anti-law enforcement uproar. Some called it ‘knee-jerk reaction’ and others ‘harassment’ of innocent riders.

By then, the government had changed gears to introduce sustainable sectoral reforms. Interior CS Fred Matiang’i put together a multi-sectoral committee comprising ministry officials, NPS, NTSA and boda boda industry leadership to work on a strategy to entrench long-standing reforms. Enriching the process are two year-old recommendations from a taskforce on boda bodas.

To fully understand and appreciate police crackdowns or any other large-scale operation, one must walk down the crime prevention knowledge lane.

And, to well understand crime reality, one must get to know how crime occurs (causality). We don’t just wake up to a high incident of robberies, for example, or thefts turnover in one territorial cluster (hotspot).

Crime incident is a result of a combination of various but aggregated insignificant acts that usually take place in our knowledge yet we dismiss them away as insignificant or choose to live with them in denial. With time, it multiplies into a marauding impunity.

Burying heads in the sand when deviance starts to manifest in families and communities is what later causes impunity of a hotspot of a crime reality. It’s simply that nuisance or irritation of lawlessness or disorder, which morphs into the ugly rowdiness that we experience daily on our roads.

It starts off innocently, as bad habits, but later balloons into crisis. This is the tipping point that calls for a zero-tolerance law enforcement policy attention.

Zero-tolerance policing is a crime prevention strategy that targets situations where the ‘broken windows’ thesis applies.

The theory refers to a rot in families and neighbourhoods, making people fearful, and the quality of life compromised. It is a situation where you may not pinpoint criminality upfront, yet you have this uncanny feeling that public space is not only invaded but has been taken over by a sense of lawlessness. This hopelessness is called fear of crime.

At this critical juncture, police must move in, perform some general law enforcement activities to mop up gangs and send out a strong message to denounce criminal usurpation of people’s rights to quality of life, and then reclaim back public space for the citizens enjoyment.

Unfortunately, it’s never easy, even for the police. There is always some kind of pushback from the gangs, politicians and activists. And that is where the war on crime is lost.

In the 90s, American urban life, especially New York City was a mess. The city had been taken hostage by beggars, panhandlers and other petty criminals.

People were fearful and stayed indoors or moved out to the suburbs and other cities. Rudy Giuliani, campaigning for the mayorship of NY coined the phrase ‘zero-tolerance on crime’ as his mantra to fix the ‘broken window’ of the city. In the UK, Tony Blair also borrowed a leaf and campaigned on the same platform of  ‘being tough on crime; being tough on causes of crime’ to fix runaway crime in London and other major cities. And to fight the mungiki menace in Kenya, minister John Michuki (now late) employed similar strategy.

Fighting crime is not about swat teams engaging tactical combat with toughened criminal gangs. By then, the criminal enterprise would have already won over law enforcement. Instead, a good proactive approach of keeping communities safe is by keeping a sharp eye on the behaviours that create a sense of insecurity (not crime per se), including a climate of fear in public spaces  and which ultimately undermine the quality of life.

The role of the public, including politicians and other opinion leaders, is, therefore, to offer utmost goodwill and support to the police to keep our communities safe by ‘being tough on crime; being tough on the causes of crime’.

— The writer is the NPS director of corporate communication and police spokesperson