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"id": 213993,
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"speaker_name": "Ms. Ndung'u",
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"speaker": {
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"legal_name": "Susanna Njoki Ndung'u",
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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Speaker, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this Bill. I will make my contribution very brief. Let me, first, congratulate the Minister and thank him for seeking to increase the number of police officers. However, I think the challenges that face the police force need to be addressed in a more holistic manner. The amount of police violence on police that we are seeing is so much. We have seen cases of policemen killing other policemen. We also see a very high rate of suicide in the July 12, 2007 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2493 police force. This is indicative of the circumstances under which police officers find themselves. Their terms and conditions of service are terrible. The way they live is terrible. The society also treats them like animals, instead of appreciating the role they play in protecting us. We need to ensure that the families of police officers who die in the line of duty are well taken care of, including payment of school fees for their children and provision of all the needs that those families will have. The needs of those families should be met as if those police officers were still alive. Mr. Speaker, Sir, in the society, we also need to recognise our heroes. It is true that, from time to time, the Commissioner of Police and the President himself do recognise our policemen who die in the line of duty posthumously, but I think we have not given them a national tribute. Perhaps, the Minister should think about announcing or putting forward the names of police officers who die every year, so that we can pay them proper tribute, and make sure that we have taken care of their families. I understand that the country is facing certain challenges with regard to insecurity. Particularly, of late, we have been talking about the Mungiki menace. We need to understand that the Mungiki menace is not a Kenyan problem. The Mungiki is an association of gangs, which runs illicit violence in many capital cities in the world. There are Mungiki -type gangs in the United States of America (USA) as well as in South Africa. They run protection and extortion rings. That is the way they make their money. Therefore, we need to move away from the label that we have given Mungiki, and ask the Minister to send a team to see how these city gangs are dealt with in other countries. That is how we can deal with them here. Let us remove this shroud of mystery around these people we are calling Mungiki . They are just city thugs, like those in any other country. We need to deal with them as such. Mr. Speaker, Sir, I think there is an upsurge of insecurity, not because of Mungiki . I want to urge the Minister to have a look at his statistics. Perhaps, he needs to start moving the concentration away from dealing with Mungiki -types to dealing with the real insecurity issues in the country. Every police station in the country compiles statistics of the kind of crimes reported to it. At the end of the year, the Commissioner of Police can tell you which crimes have been committed the most during that year. The Commissioner of Police can tell you that the most committed crime in this country is assault, and that 90 per cent of assaults are done in the domestic context. So, assault will happen in the family between parents, spouses and between children and their parents, in the family environment. The second-highest crime that occurs in Kenya is sexual violence. So, we are saying that the police in this country are pre-occupied mostly with dealing with crimes relating to domestic and sexual violence, yet the amount of resources being deployed to deal with Mungiki is not the same as that being deployed to deal with the most serious crimes in this country. Therefore, I want to persuade him that if we reduce the two highest crimes in the country, we will be able to free our police officers to go and deal with other kinds of crime. Perhaps, it is time to introduce a hit squad for domestic violence. We have hit squads for other things. We have squads for drugs, robbers and terrorists. We even have got special units for tourists. We need to have a hit squad that deals with domestic violence. Then the message we will have sent to our families--- Domestic violence actually breeds criminals. When we forgive violence in the homes, we breed violent criminals. The likelihood that a robber or a Mungiki follower has come from a violent home is very high. Let us get to the bottom of that problem."
}