Police merger: Good intent, bad execution

Late last year, President Uhuru Kenyatta announced the merger of the Kenya Police Service and the Administration Police (AP) into General Duty Police officers under the command of the Inspector-General of Police.

The move sought to eliminate waste, duplication and overlap of duties in the National Police Service. The 39,680 regular police and 24,572 AP officers now make a 64,252-strong formation.

Similarly, in the United States, in 2006, the Marion County Sheriff’s Department was absorbed into the Indianapolis Police.

As with the New York agencies, the idea in Indianapolis was to reduce duplicated efforts and services and use the best aspects of each agency’s practices.

Then-Indianapolis Metro Commander Paul Ciesielski cited the main challenges of the merger as pertaining to “administrative practices and personnel”; he said the units operated under two sets of policy that were “similar yet different while personnel hiring and training practices were different as well.

“Should we do this again, we would probably allow for a couple lead time so we can get the details taken care of before it actually happens,” he said.

The Kenyan police merger was well-intended, but the execution was hastily done.

One option for the Interior ministry would have been to merge the AP and the General Service Unit (GSU) to form an equivalent of the US Border Patrol Unit with specific tasks that superlatively complement what the military would, ideally, do internally.

Both AP and GSU undergo paramilitary training.

The US Border Patrol unit has a strength of about 20,000 personnel and uses a variety of equipment and methods to detect people or vehicles entering the country illegally.

Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS), Germany’s federal border protection unit established in 1951, guards borders, performs coast guard services along the 450-mile coastline, engages in counter-terrorism, protects state buildings, airports and railways and supplies sky marshals for airline security, in-house security for German embassies and rescue helicopter services.

The second realignment would be to revamp the regular police as a stand-alone unit and build its capability with support of FBIs, MI-6, Mossad and other Western police outfits to better deal with sophisticated investigations and crime prevention.

These include cybercrime, corruption, terrorism, organised crimes and transnational crimes. Traffic department would be made less attractive by having all officers trained to perform the duties.

Thirdly, retrain the National Youth Service men and women for an additional three-month training in arms and other tactics and deploy them to guard all government buildings and provide escort — save for top government officers.

That would free AP, GSU and regular police officers from these duties to be redeployed for core duties.

Finally, merge the wildlife and forest services and task the new unit with protection and conservation of flora and fauna.

Training for the team would include handling sophisticated crimes such as cross-border and in-country poaching, logging and terrorism in the context of Boni Forest.

Meanwhile, most analysts opine that, it may take quite a while before the teams, as constituted, are wired to read from same script. All have different training, doctrines, formations and esprit de corps.