Dry-clean the brains of all our leaders to install better policy and humane content

By most accounts, the tiny European country of Switzerland is a police state. Yet, on the three lengthy occasions on which I have lived in the Alpine Swiss city of Geneva, I rarely saw police officers upon the street.

No, there is no contradiction. Switzerland is the proof that effective policing need never mean a hideous show of force.

In certain other European states — especially the Scandinavian ones — the sighting of an officer in a neighbourhood normally creates a general feeling of safety, security and wellbeing.

Friendliness, reliability and readiness to help solve street and domestic contradictions are what define the police in all truly civilised societies.

That is where a contradiction may creep in. If industry — if techno-material “development” — were what define civilisation, we should expect to find that the United States policemen are the world’s politest, most rational and most congenial in discharging the national responsibility of ensuring communal cohesion and peace in the struggle for collective econo-intellectual uplift.

Yet we find that in the US — the world’s most developed society — policemen treat human beings with exactly the same abandon, mindlessness and inhumanity as they do in the world’s least developed societies.

Why is police behaviour in Kenya a pallid shadow of police behaviour in the United States?

That is the whole question. What is the root of the brainlessness, cruelty, blood thirst and moral depravity that characterise policing in Kenya? Why are our policemen and women so ready with the bludgeon, the automatic machine gun and the teargas canister, even upon a group as harmless as schoolchildren?

No. Cord should stop cheapening the issue by means of siaza za pesa nane. The Jubillee Government is not the root-culprit. Jubilee is only the present link in a long chain of what Patrick Moynihan called “benign neglect” whose taproot lies in colonialism, the regime to which we owe our policing in its present structure and anti-human “philosophy” of existence.

NEW PHILOSOPHY OF POLICING

None of our present political parties even betrays any awareness of the need for a new philosophy of policing, namely, by returning the force to its original place as the tool by which the world’s first civilised societies — certain political states in the north-eastern African and south-western Asian continuum — could create and perpetuate a mutual mass policy of politeness as the best method of living together in the local commonwealths newly created by civilisation.

In the last analysis, then, effective policing is a function of education. In present-day Kenya, it calls for a completely new system of bringing up all our custodians of law and order.

It demands a positive kind of brain dry-cleaning of all our institutions involved in moral and intellectual nurture in order to install in those brains a new content, a new commitment to humanity’s cause.

If — by I know not what method — we can “dry-clean” the brains of all our parents, teachers, priests and governors in order to re-equip those brains with a new, greatly more humane, content, that would be the only beneficial answer to the moral and intellectual putrefaction into which all our social service institutions have fallen.

That is why it cannot cut any ice merely to arrest and punish single culprits in such an isolated case as the police tear-gassing and gravely injuring small tots in a case where profound and widespread ministerial corruption is the whole problem.

For the long run, what we need is a single all-pervading answer to the enduring and deepening problem of moral filth and intellectual mediocrity in all our service and other institutions.

For the nonce, the question is: What exactly is the intellectual content and moral purpose of all our police training institutions? Have Parliament and the human rights organisations studied the relevant police training syllabus and convinced themselves that the training system is adequately serving the purposes for which we established that force?

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