Review law and order policing model

It’s time we declare the Michuki traffic rules the official default reaction of government after a fatal accident happens in Kenya. When the tragic Fort Ternan accident that claimed 58 lives happened last month, the government wasted no time in beating the Michuki Rules drumbeats.

For any curious economist, one can’t fail to notice a clear textbook case of an acute negative externality here.

The reason the government finds the rules as an easy default position is because the social cost of its implementation doesn’t fall on police officers. Like in the case of the Fort Ternan accident, the Inspector- General of Police told a parliamentary committee that the bus was never inspected by police officers throughout the journey despite passing a number of road blocks and none was interdicted. So, the cost of failing to implement traffic laws is never even levied on police officers.

But this negative externality problem is not only confined within traffic policing but plays out across the whole policing spectrum. It is a systemic defect that arises from our top-down policing approach of merely reducing crime and maintaining law and order as the end goal.

Let’s look at our aggressive “law and order” policing tactics using protests, arrest and extra-judicial killings as the parameters to examine the systemic negative externality problem.

Many streets protests always end up in confrontation because in a law and order policing approach, police see their duty as simply to maintain order. Therefore, any interaction between police and civilians in a protest always deteriorates into a confrontation that is resolved by use of force.

Now, the primary duty of government is to keep people safe and secure but that does not mean public safety can be defined simply as crime reduction or maintenance of order. Public safety and security in fact entails freedom from personal victimisation, community disenfranchisement or government overreach.

Available data shows that there is always a correlation between police being attacked in the line of duty and mass arrests. For example, in one documented incident in Kayole area police reacted by arresting more than 200 people. Unfortunately, 90 per cent of those arrested had no links to the attack on a police officer but because police don’t bear any responsibility for arbitrary arrests they will always do mass arrests. The costs of arrests are frightening and humiliating, use valuable resources, burden arrestees with lost income and arrest records.

The most referenced example of this negative externality is when Israel, a decade ago, transferred responsibility of arrests from it police force to prison authority. What happened was that weekly arrests shot up and lasted longer. Upon further analysis, most of the new arrests were for minor offences, and the new arrestees were 20 per cent less likely to be charged with a crime due to weaker evidence. This made crime-control difficult because it at the same time undermined effective policing.

Just like in Israel, in Kenya this negative externality problem has become septic bolstering high rate of extra judicial killings because we have simply entrenched a policing system whose end game is simply reduction of crime at any cost with no responsibility on the police officers.

Therefore, Kenya needs to re-look its “law and order” policing approach and the main recommendation to the police internal affairs unit would be to adopt a “just culture review” than a “punitive review” of police interaction incidents when handling complaints. Adopting a sentinel event review of all stakeholder, forward-leaning mechanism will go beyond just disciplining police officers but also minimise the risk of similar errors in future and improve overall system reliability.

Rarely do incidents result from a single act or event, at most times it always signals more complex flaws that threaten the integrity of the whole system reason why errors in high-risk enterprises like medicine and aviation are regarded as system or organisation errors.