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{
    "id": 825657,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/825657/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 364,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "South Mugirango, KNC",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Silvanus Onyiego",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 1417,
        "legal_name": "Silvanus Osoro Onyiego",
        "slug": "silvanus-osoro-onyiego"
    },
    "content": " Thank you, Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker. I equally rise to contribute. From the outset, I wish that the House in its entirety supports or approves the nominees as presented before us. This is an independent body whose basic role is to oversee the police service and to look at the plight of our good police officers in this country. Having those officers or able men and women in this Commission to exercise their duties and empowering them will help us improve our police service. You will notice that we have come of age. There is a colleague of mine who talked about a police force. It is unfortunate he is not in the House. I wanted to remind him that we do not have a police force; we have a police service. As it is enshrined in Articles 239 and 245 of the Constitution, this is a police service. There is need for us to have an active independent body to oversee the work of the police. I say this as a person who is involved in so many activities with police officers. It is important for us to notice that in as much as the Constitution provides for the National Police Service, we still have some police officers who still think that we have a national police force. At times they do things which are not very good or enshrined in the law. If they do not have an oversight body to supervise their work and see whether what they do is right or wrong, we will be wrong. I will cite a scenario that happened over the weekend where an advocate of the High Court of Kenya was detained at Karura Police Station in Banana for going to check on the plight of his client who had been detained there. During the questioning which was a normal interrogation by the Officer Commanding Police Station (OCS), the OCS felt that the advocate - an officer of the court - was rude. He instead released his client and detained the advocate, Mr. Moses, since Friday. It took the intervention of the president of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) to have the advocate released. We need to empower IPOA officers to go to the ground and see what some police officers are doing. In as much as we keep saying that police officers work in hard conditions, that does not give them leeway or locus standi to work against the Constitution. Just because they are paid peanuts and we call it a sacrifice does not mean that they should go to the streets every Friday, arrest all the people they see at the bus stop, put them in one vehicle, detain them at the station and the following day ask each detainee for Kshs2,000 to have them released. Police officers keep on reviewing those terms. A detainee spends one night in a cell and is told to pay Kshs2000. It reduces to Kshs1000 after another night. After another one day, it reduces to Kshs500. On Monday, they release the detainees or charge them and say that they were disorderly, even if they were not drunk."
}