Effectiveness of Police Reforms: Merging of Administration, Police Service and Regular Police in Kenya: A Case of Nakuru City County

The main objective of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of police reform initiated through the merging of the Administration and the Regular police in Kenya. To understand this development, the paper seeks to analyse the historical development of the Kenya police. The evolution of police and their command structure can be traced to colonial and post-colonial regimes in Kenya. Kenya police was an alien institution established during the colonial regime after Kenya was declared a British protectorate in 1895. The pre-colonial African societies had elaborate systems of cohesion, sectional relations, and codes of justice, all of which contributed to the corporate polity of their social groups. The Kenyan police, established by the colonial state, was heavily borrowed from colonial India. The British pushed for adopting the Indian Penal Code, derived from English common law, which would serve as the basis of the formal criminal justice system in Kenya. This was by design to dominate and control Africans to achieve their capitalistic agenda. Human rights violations characterized the colonial and post-independence police force. This necessitated various reforms in the police service. The merger of the Administration Police Service and Regular Police focused heavily on command structure, police performance and welfare. With these well-documented reforms, there is a concern about crime mitigation goals since incorporating the community through the Nyumba Kumi initiative has not yielded the expected objective in Nakuru City County. Therefore, there is a need for proper streamlining of police operations with members of the public as the primary clientele.