Changing police culture is more important than creating new police units
Opinion
By
Editorial
| Jun 05, 2026
That plans by Nairobi County Government and the National Government to form a Nairobi Metropolitan Police Service (NMPS) have encountered bureaucratic bottlenecks is not surprising.
As a result, both governments have sent teams to New York, USA, to study metropolitan policing. This raises concerns: Is the proposal to set up a police service for Kenya’s capital turning out to be another bureaucratic gravy train funded by taxpayers?
Granted, Nairobi, a fast-growing capital, hosts multinational corporations, UN agencies, diplomatic missions, and financial institutions. These factors create unique security challenges that require a tailored response, such as that of a metropolitan police service.
But if we are honest with ourselves, most previous attempts to carve out new police units from the National Police Service have not ended well. Many began with great promise but eventually fell into disrepute. This raises a fundamental question: Do we need a new police unit, or do we need a new police culture, a new way of doing things, and a new relationship between the police and the public?
We do not need a costly trip to New York to tell us what is already obvious: Creating a new police unit without addressing the underlying problems afflicting the entire police service is unlikely to succeed.
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Those problems are well known. They include corruption, the entrenched kitu kidogo culture, extrajudicial killings, officers who act as judge and jury, poor welfare conditions, inadequate housing, and glaring shortcomings in training. Corruption and violence are also not unfamiliar to Nairobi City County Inspectorate officers.
Unless these issues are addressed first, the proposed NMPS will merely be old wine in new wineskins. It would amount to whitewashing the deep-rooted challenges facing the police service rather than solving them.
History gives us ample reason to be sceptical. We have already witnessed several reform attempts. The Kenya Police Force was renamed the National Police Service. The motto changed, and police reforms were introduced. Institutions such as the Internal Affairs Unit were established to improve accountability. Yet have these measures fundamentally transformed policing in Kenya? The answer, unfortunately, is no.
We have even changed police uniforms to make them friendlier. But did the new uniform create a police service that is less corrupt, more efficient, or more accountable? Again, the answer is no.
We should first focus on completing the reforms we have already begun. The priority should be overhauling the entire policing system to make it less corrupt, more accountable to the Constitution and the people, better equipped, better housed, better trained, and better remunerated.
Only after these foundational issues have been addressed will the NMPS make sense. Establishing NMPS without addressing these issues will be like putting the same monkeys in a familiar forest; we'll still hear of corruption and extrajudicial killings.