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‘THIEVES SHOULD NOT LIVE AMONGST

PEOPLE’: UNDER-PROTECTION AND
POPULAR SUPPORT FOR POLICE VIOLENCE
IN NAIROBI
KAMAU WAIRURI*

ABSTRACT
This paper examines how communities at the urban margins, who are
under-protected by the state police, understand police reforms through
an examination of the unusual case of street protests in support of a police
officer who had killed two young men in Githurai in Nairobi. I explore how
the under-protection of communities at the urban margins by the police
leads to a reliance on various forms of vigilantism to generate security
and justice outcomes. Noting the limitations of community vigilantism, I
explore how these communities come to rely on police vigilantism, a form
of vigilantism that has received limited attention in African studies. Based
on insights generated from data collected in Githurai in March and April
2015, I argue that residents of Githurai protested against the arrest of a
local police vigilante, whom they had come to rely on for security, because
they considered his deployment of violence against suspected criminals to
be justified and also feared that his arrest would expose them to further
insecurity. I conclude that police reform efforts should pay attention to the
innovations that communities have developed at the grassroots to generate
security and justice outcome in absence of reliable protection by the state
police.

Introduction
In September 2014, residents of Githurai staged street protests against
the arrest of Police Constable Titus Musili, popularly known as Katitu.

*Kamau Wairuri (kamau.wairuri@ed.ac.uk) is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for African

Studies, University of Edinburgh. I gratefully acknowledge the guidance and insights provided
by anonymous peer reviewers and editors at African Affairs. I also acknowledge feedback from
participants at events in Edinburgh and Nairobi at which earlier drafts of this work were
presented. I am especially grateful to Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock, Olly Owen, Sa’eed Husaini,
and Thomas Johnson for their detailed comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Research
support for this article was supported by St. Antony’s College and the African Studies Centre
at the University of Oxford and IFRA-Nairobi.

61
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Githurai is a poor suburb to the north of Nairobi that can be termed an
urban margin, the zones of urban relegation—commonly referred to as
‘slums’, ‘ghettoes’, or ‘favelas’—where multiple forms of deprivation accu-
mulate.1 The protestors blocked Thika Road, one of Nairobi’s major roads,
they engaged the police in running battles, and brought business in the
usually abuzz Githurai to a standstill. The protestors were eventually dis-
persed on the third day by the General Service Unit, a paramilitary unit
of the Kenyan state police known for its brutal approach to public order
policing.2
Katitu had been arrested for shooting Kenneth Kimani dead on the
evening of 14 April 2013 in the neighbourhood.3 He claimed that Kimani
was a thief, one of the young men who snatched mobile phones and bags
from motorists and passengers while they were stuck in traffic at the infa-
mous Githurai roundabout.4 Kimani’s family and friends disputed that
claim and marched to the police station to demand action against the police
officer. When the senior officers failed to take action, the family lodged
a complaint with the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA),
then Kenya’s newly established civilian police oversight agency.5 Following
their investigation into the matter, IPOA concluded that Kimani’s killing
was unlawful and recommended to the Director of Public Prosecutions
(DPP) that Katitu be charged with murder.6 The DPP concurred with the
recommendations by IPOA and issued an arrest warrant. Crucially, for my
purposes here, on 24 August 2014, before he was arrested, Katitu allegedly
shot and killed Oscar Muchoki, Kimani’s elder brother.7 Oscar was to be
a key witness in the pending murder trial.
It is noteworthy that even though Katitu was arrested for Kimani’s mur-
der, many of the people who participated in the protest thought he was

1. Javier Auyero, Agustín Burbano De Lara, and María Fernanda Berti, ‘Violence and the
State at the urban margins’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 43, 1 (2014), pp. 94–116.
2. These events were reported widely in the media. See, for instance, Muraya,
Joseph, ‘Githurai protestors plan march to the DPP’, Capital FM, 12 September 2014.
<https://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2014/09/githurai-protestors-plan-march-to-the-dpp/>
(10 May 2020); Samuel Karanja, ‘Githurai residents demand release of officer’, Daily
Nation, 9 September 2014, <https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Githurai-Thika-Road-Protest/
1056-2447412-1qhg9az/index.html> (10 May 2020).
3. Kenya Law, Republic v Titus Ngamau Musila Katitu, Judgement (Wakiaga, J), Criminal
Case 78 of 2014 (High Court of Kenya, Nairobi, 7 February 2018).
4. Stella Mwangi, Kimani’s sister, runs a blog where she has detailed her reaction to the
deaths of her two brothers (www.stellavwmwangi.wordpress.com) (12 February 2015).
5. Nyambega Gisesa, ‘Why police shot Kenneth Kimani thrice in the head’, Standard Digital,
11 May 2013, <https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000083341/n-a> (10 May 2020).
6. Fred Mukinda, ‘Policeman charged with murder’, Daily Nation, 6 September 2014,
<https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Titus-Ngamau-Musila-Policeman-Murder/1056-2443932-
13od48nz/index.html> (10 May 2020).
7. Fred Mukinda, ‘Keriako Tobiko accuses policeman of killing witness’, Daily Nation,
3 September 2014, <https://www.nation.co.ke/news/DPP-accuses-policeman-of-killing-wit
ness/-/1056/2440400/-/odu2ws/-/index.html> (10 May 2020).
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arrested for killing Oscar, whose death was still fresh in their minds. Even
though people were ambivalent about Kimani’s character, many of them
saw Oscar as an unrepentant thief who deserved brutal punishment.8 Some
people claimed that on the day he was shot dead, he had attempted to stab
Katitu with a knife.9 For this reason, some of my interlocutors who par-
ticipated in the protests struggled to understand how a police officer could
be punished for doing what they saw as his job. It also matters that Katitu
was no ordinary police officer. As I demonstrate below, he was Githurai’s
‘Super Cop’, a police vigilante who had gained notoriety for unorthodox
policing methods and brutality towards suspected thieves. His antics had
led many people to believe that he had single-handedly reduced crime lev-
els in Githurai. My analysis here revolves around these two crucial figures:
Oscar and Katitu.
My purpose here is to understand the socio-political context within
which this rare public display of popular support for police brutality
emerged and what it says about the legitimacy of police accountability at
the urban margins. I argue that the popular support for police violence
emanates from the under-protection of the communities at the urban mar-
gins by the state which, in a context marked by high levels of insecurity,
led the community to rely on a brutal police vigilante for protection. As a
result, many of the residents of Githurai took to the streets to protest Kat-
itu’s arrest because they saw it as a disruption of their localized strategy for
handling crime that would leave them even more exposed to insecurity. I
conclude that the legitimacy of police accountability should not be taken
for granted, as some analysts do,10 but rather generated by ensuring that
reform efforts pay attention to the security concerns of the people at the
grassroots.
My study contributes to broader and ongoing discussions in African
studies. The first is on the adoption of police reform ideas, which orig-
inate elsewhere, in African countries and their effects. Africanists have
noted that the adoption of ideas such as crime prevention and community
policing has been counterproductive. Jonny Steinberg shows how the adop-
tion of crime prevention policies in South Africa reproduced Apartheid-era
forms of policing.11 Similarly, Mutuma Ruteere and Marie-Emmanuelle
Pommerolle show that the adoption of community policing in Kenya
served to decentralize repression rather than to democratize policing as was

8. Interview, Geoffrey, Githurai, 27 March 2015.

9. Interview, Tembo, Githurai, 25 March 2015.
10. Anneke Osse, ‘Police reform in Kenya: A process of “meddling through”’, Policing and
Society 26, 8 (2016), pp. 907–24.
11. Jonny Steinberg, ‘Crime prevention goes abroad’: Policy transfer and policing in Post-
Apartheid South Africa’, Theoretical Criminology 15, 4 (2011), pp. 349–64.
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promised.12 My study adds to these insights by presenting an example of
the adoption of police accountability, which has not been examined pre-
viously. In this paper, I go beyond the effects of these reforms on the
police and policing that scholars have previously focussed on, to explore
how they are understood by the communities at the urban margins who
are under-protected by the state police.
The second is on the vigilantism in Africa as one of the ways that com-
munities seek to generate security and justice outcomes in the face of
under-protection by the state police. Most of the commentary on vigilan-
tism has focussed on community vigilantism, which refers to situations
where citizens take the responsibility for security upon themselves in a
wide spectrum of forms, ranging from organized vigilante groups to the
more ephemeral mob justice.13 Although some analysts have examined
mob justice, the ephemeral policing mechanisms where rowdy crowds
pursue and attack people accused of crimes,14 most of the attention has
been directed towards vigilante groups have received much attention within
African studies. The most commonly cited examples are the Amadlozi in
South Africa,15 the Bakassi Boys in Nigeria,16 and Mungiki, Kamjesh and
Taliban in Kenya.17 Recently, there has been increasing attention on police
vigilantism, the situations where police officers work to generate justice out-
comes in ways that go beyond what is anticipated by the legal system.18 The
work of Helene Maria Kyed showing how people in Mozambique report
cases to the police with no intention of having the matters taken to court is
a notable example here.19 My study adds an empirical case to this emerg-
ing scholarship through the examination of how a police vigilante emerged
and is said to have operated in Githurai.
I have divided this paper into five sections. Following this introduction
is a discussion of the methodology applied in the study covering how the

12. Mutuma Ruteere and Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, ‘Democratizing security or

decentralizing repression? The ambiguities of community policing in Kenya’, African Affairs
102, 409 (2003), pp. 587–604.
13. Atreyee Sen and David Pratten, ‘Global vigilantes: Perspectives on justice and violence’,
in David Pratten and Sen Atreyee (eds), Global vigilantes (Hurst & Company, London, 2007),
pp. 1–24.
14. Justice Tankebe, ‘Ghanaian vigilantism and the rule of law’, Law & Society Review 43,
2 (2009), pp. 245–70.
15. Lars Buur, ‘Democracy and its discontents: Vigilantism, sovereignty and human rights
in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 35, 118 (2006), pp. 571–84.
16. Kate Meagher, ‘Hijacking civil society: The inside story of the Bakassi Boys vigilante
group of south-eastern Nigeria’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 45, 1 (2007), pp.
89–115.
17. David Anderson, ‘Vigilantes, violence and the politics of public order in Kenya’, African
Affairs 101, 405 (2002), pp. 531–55.
18. Cooper-Knock and Owen, ‘Between vigilantism and bureaucracy.’
19. Helene Maria Kyed, ‘Inside the police stations in Maputo City: Between legality and
legitimacy’, in Jan Beek, Mirco Göpfert, Olly Owen, and Johnny Steinberg (eds), Police in
Africa: The street level view (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017), pp. 213–30.
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data analysed here were collected and analysed. This is followed by an
examination of Kenya’s adoption of police accountability ideas and the
establishment of IPOA, which provided an avenue for Kimani’s family to
seek justice following his death. Next, I examine how people in Githurai
make sense of crime and insecurity, showing how the wazaliwa20 young
men come to be seen as the quintessential security threat and therefore
as deserving of brutal policing. In the following section, I explore the
emergence of Katitu as Githurai’s ‘Super Cop’, the police vigilante that
people relied on to solve the challenges of crime and insecurity that they
faced. I then conclude the paper by noting that the legitimacy of police
reform efforts should not be presumed but rather generated by addressing
concerns of the under-protection of communities at the urban margins.

Methodology
The paper is primarily based on empirical data collected in March and
April 2015 through in-depth and semi-structured interviews with Githurai
residents. The respondents were purposely recruited on the basis of pre-
sumed custody of relevant information. Two friends who lived in Githurai
at the time introduced me to some of the people they knew who had par-
ticipated in the protests. I then relied on snowballing to reach additional
respondents. In total, I spoke to 33 residents of Githurai including inter-
views with 25 people amongst them bus drivers and conductors, market
traders, students, the local chief, and managers of big businesses in Githu-
rai. I also held a focus group discussion with eight bodaboda (motorbike)
riders. All participants have been pseudonymized to protect their identities.
I interviewed most of the people at their places of work, although I
conducted a few interviews in public places such as food kiosks and the
community library. Naturally, some of the individual interviews turned
into group interviews as other people joined in the conversation. In some
cases, the debates that ensued amongst the respondents were generative
because they highlighted some of the social dynamics that I may not have
otherwise encountered. Although I spoke to most people just once, I held
repeat interviews with some of the respondents, such as Mzito, a self-
identified reformed armed robber who had survived two gun battles with
the police before abandoning crime and starting to work as a bus conduc-
tor. While he was initially hesitant to meet me and tell me about his life,
our continued engagements helped me build a rapport with him. Subse-
quently, he introduced me to other young men who had been or were still
engaged in crime. He also took me to places that I may not have been able

20. This is a Kiswahili term that roughly translates to ‘those who were born here’. As I
discuss below, the term has broader socio-political significance.
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to access otherwise, such as where illegal drug trade—especially the sale of
chang’aa (an illicit local gin) and marijuana—was conducted. As a young
man myself, walking around with him and going into places that the police
frequented sometimes made me anxious. We agreed to mitigate the risks by
working only in the daytime, using the main pathways that were well pop-
ulated at most times, and not staying in any place for long. When we came
across someone in these settings that I hoped to interview, we scheduled
to meet elsewhere.
Even though this study presents an illustrative case of the phenomenon
of popular support for police violence rather than seeking to generate gen-
eralizable insights, it has suffered from several important limitations. As a
condition of my ethics approval for the study, I could not stay in Githu-
rai after dark, meaning that I missed out on observing the busy hours of
the early evening as many of the residents who worked elsewhere returned
home. This also meant that I only spoke to people who were based in Githu-
rai during the day. Additionally, even though speaking to police officers
may have been useful, I was unable to gain consent to interview them.
However, a few visits to the police station in pursuit of appointments pre-
sented me with opportunities to observe what happens there and in some
cases interact with some of the people coming there to seek justice.

Towards police accountability in Kenya

The public display of popular support for police brutality—the use of force
by police officers that exceeds what is reasonably necessary to accomplish a
legal law enforcement purpose21 —by people at the urban margins is curi-
ous. On the one hand, numerous studies from around the world22 and
in Kenya23 have repeatedly shown that people at the urban margins are
disproportionately affected by police brutality. On the other hand, police
accountability (that Githurai residents seemed to be protesting against) is
imagined by policy actors as the solution to police brutality.24 Thus, on
the face of it, protests that are seemingly against police accountability, and
in favour of police brutality by the people it is said to disproportionately
affect, appear to constitute a paradox.25

21. James Fyfe, ‘Training to reduce police–citizen violence’, in W Geller and H. Toch (eds),
And justice for all: Understanding and controlling police abuse of force (Police Executive Research
Forum, Washington, DC, 1995), pp. 151–75.
22. Auyero, et al, ‘Violence and the state at the urban margins.’
23. Naomi van Stapele. ‘We are not Kenyans’: Extra-judicial killings, manhood and cit-
izenship in Mathare, a Nairobi Ghetto’, Conflict, Security and Development 16, 4 (2016),
pp. 301–25.
24. Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) & Kenya Human Rights Commission
(KHRC), ‘The Police, the people, the politics: Police accountability in Kenya’, (CHRI, New
Delhi & KHRC, Nairobi, 2006).
25. Teresa Caldeira, ‘The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil’, Ethnography 3,
3 (2002), pp. 235–63.
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Some analysts attempt to resolve the paradox by highlighting divisions
within these communities at the urban margins, noting that brutal policing
is often supported by those whom it rarely affects and opposed by those
whom it targets. For instance, Julia Hornberger noted that police brutal-
ity was supported by members of a local Pentecostal church against those
who did not subscribe to their moral code.26 Additionally, Jonny Stein-
berg notes that the young men in the South African townships who are
the main target of police action were opposed to violent policing unlike
other people in the communities.27 These analysts present the commu-
nities at the urban margins in a dichotomous fashion that is difficult to
sustain empirically. Therefore, while I find this analysis meaningful, I con-
tend that a fuller understanding of this phenomenon requires us to go
beyond these community divisions to examine how certain people come
to be seen as deserving brutal punishment. This is crucial to my analy-
sis here. I therefore follow Teresa Caldeira whose work shows how young
black males from the urban margins in Brazil are targeted and treated vio-
lently by the police and the community because they fit the stereotype of
the criminal.28 In this paper, I extend this work through an examination
of the identity of the wazaliwa in Githurai because it shows that sup-
port for police violence is contingent on the circumstances and the actors
involved.
Katitu’s arrest and prosecution need to be understood within the broader
context of police reform in Kenya—especially the adoption of police
accountability as the police response to police brutality. Police brutality in
Kenya has a long history spanning the colonial29 and post-colonial30 peri-
ods. In some cases, especially following spectacular cases of violent crime,
this police brutality has enjoyed popular support. For instance, Mutuma
Ruteere has noted the support for police brutality against Mungiki, an
outlawed vigilante group that terrorized Kenyans with gruesome violence
including a series of beheadings.31 Elsewhere, I have noted the public sup-
port for the targeting of Kenyan Somalis and Muslims following a wave of
terrorist attacks by al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based terrorist organization.32

26. Julia Hornberger, ‘From general to commissioner to general-on the popular state of
policing in South Africa’, Law & Social Inquiry 38, 3 (2013), pp. 598–614.
27. Steinberg, ‘Crime prevention goes abroad’.
28. Caldeira, ‘The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil’.
29. David Anderson, ‘Policing, prosecution and the law in colonial Kenya, c1905-39’, in
David M Anderson and D Killingray (eds), Policing the empire: Government, authority and
control, 1830–1940 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1991), pp. 183–200.
30. Ruteere and Pommerolle, ‘Democratizing security or decentralizing repression?’
31. Mutuma Ruteere, ‘Dilemmas of crime, human rights and the politics of Mungiki
violence in Kenya’ (Kenya Human Rights Institute, Nairobi, 2009).
32. Kamau Wairuri, ‘Operation sanitize Eastleigh’: Rethinking interventions to counter vio-
lent extremism in Mutuma Ruteere & Patrick Mutahi (eds), Confronting Violent extremism in
Kenya: Debates, ideas and challenges (CHRIPS, Nairobi, 2018), pp. 135–50.
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Still, many cases of police brutality are met with street protests demand-
ing that the police officers responsible be held to account, and there has
also been a sustained advocacy campaign by civic organizations to address
the problem.33 Nonetheless, the biggest impetus for police reform in Kenya
was the 2007/2008 post-election violence in which more than 1,133 peo-
ple died and 500,000 were internally displaced.34 The official state inquiry
into the violence, the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Vio-
lence headed by Justice Philip Waki (hence the Waki Commission), noted
that the police had not only failed to protect citizens who were under attack,
but estimated that they were directly responsible for about one-third of the
deaths that occurred in that violence.35 To address these problems, both
the Waki Commission and the subsequent National Task Force on Police
Reforms (headed by Justice Philip Ransley, hence the Ransley Task Force)
recommended the enhancement of police accountability to address police
brutality.36 These proposals were adopted leading to several changes in the
architecture of state policing in Kenya, including the establishment of the
IPOA, a civilian police oversight agency with the mandate of investigating
police misconduct, especially cases of death or serious injury at the hands
of the police.37
The adoption of police accountability as a policy response to police bru-
tality in Kenya needs to be understood within the broader context out of
which it emerges. As I noted above, scholars have shown that the adoption
of police reforms ideas from the West to African countries is often coun-
terproductive due to the failure of their advocates and implementers to pay
attention to the complex socio-political dynamics at the local level.38 It
is noteworthy that in some cases, the journeys of these ideas may include
a stop in other African countries. For instance, the design of the police
accountability framework was influenced, not only by the Independent
Police Complaints Commission in the United Kingdom, but also the Inde-
pendent Police Investigative Directorate in South Africa.39 However, to say
that these policy ideas originate elsewhere and that their implementation is

33. Yoshiaki Furuzawa, ‘Two police reforms in Kenya’, Journal of International Development
and Cooperation 17, 1 (2011), p. 57.
34. Ruteere and Pommerolle, ‘Democratizing security or decentralizing repression?’
35. Republic of Kenya, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence
(Republic of Kenya, Nairobi, 2008), pp. 384–5.
36. Ibid.; Republic of Kenya. Report of the National Taskforce on Police Reforms. (Republic
of Kenya, Nairobi, 2009).
37. Republic of Kenya, The Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) Act (2011).
38. Steinberg, ‘Crime prevention goes abroad’.
39. Richard Stacey. Policing Democracy: The influence of South Africa’s Post-apartheid
security arrangements on police oversight under Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, in R. Dixon and
T. Roux (eds), Constitutional triumphs, Constitutional disappointments: A critical assessment of the
1996 South African Constitution’s local and international Influence (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2018), pp. 341–58.
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often counterproductive is not to suggest that they are unimportant. Peo-
ple at the urban margins sometimes rely on them to access justice following
victimization by the police. This is consistent with the arguments advanced
by other scholars that people still rely on formal state mechanisms to defend
themselves against the police, even though they face tremendous difficulties
in accessing them,40 as Julia Eckert argues in her study of this phenomenon
in India.41 Similarly, in Githurai, those who had lost family and friends
to police brutality spoke in favour of the formal criminal justice system
despite acknowledging that it was ineffective and even counterproductive,
as I discuss below.42
In this case, it matters greatly that Katitu shot and killed Kimani in
August 2013, after IPOA had already been established. This meant that,
unlike many aggrieved families before them, Kimani’s family had an avenue
through which they could pursue accountability. Previously, police officers
were only arrested and charged in court when instances of police brutal-
ity gained political salience either because the police killed someone of a
higher socio-economic status, such as when a police officer shot and killed
James Ng’ang’a, the son of a former Member of Parliament,43 or when the
magnitude of the violence was high such as when police officers shot and
killed seven taxi drivers in Kawangware.44 Yet, even in those cases, the out-
come of the court proceedings often failed to meet the expectations of the
victims’ families for justice. In Ng’ang’a’s case, the officer was sentenced to
death while his accomplice was let free,45 while the officers in the Kawang-
ware case who were convicted of murder by the High Court were acquitted
by the Court of Appeal.46 As Kimani’s case did not fit into either of these
categories, it could have been easily ignored by the authorities if IPOA had
not been in existence.
It is notable that Katitu’s case was one of only two cases where IPOA
obtained the conviction of police officers in the first six years of its
existence. The other was the conviction of two police officers, Veronica

40. See, for instance, Eva Brems and Charles Olufemi Adekoya, ‘Human rights enforcement
by people living in poverty: Access to justice in Nigeria’, Journal of African Law 54, 2 (2010),
pp. 258–82.
41. Julia Eckert, ‘The Trimurti of the state: State violence and the promises of order and
destruction’, Sociologus 55, 2 (2005), pp. 181–217, p. 191.
42. Interview, Mzito, Githurai, 29 March 2015.
43. Jillo Kadida, ‘Former MP’s son “killed after fight”’, Daily Nation, 25 May 2009,
<https://www.nation.co.ke/news/1056-603538-jp1frkz/index.html> (10 May 2020).
44. Kenya Law, Republic v Ahmed Mohammed Omar & 5 Others, Judgment (F Ochieng),
Criminal Case 14 of 2010 (The High Court of Kenya, Nairobi, 18 December 2012).
45. Paul Ogemba, ‘Officer to die for killing doctor,’ Daily Nation, 1 March 2014, <https://
www.nation.co.ke/news/Officer-to-die-for-killing-doctor/1056-2226316-iujrmv/index.html>
(10 May 2020).
46. Kenya Law, Ahmed Mohammed Omar & 5 Others v Republic, Judgement (E M
Githinji, D K Musinga and J Mohammed), Criminal Case 414 of 2012 (Court of Appeal
of Kenya, Nairobi, 27 June 2014).
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Gitahi and Issa Mzee, for the killing of Kwekwe Mwandaza, a 14-year-
old girl in Kwale County in Kenya’s Coastal region.47 Despite the street
protests, Katitu was charged with Kimani’s murder at the High Court in
Nairobi. The court found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to
15 years of imprisonment.48 The Judge took note of the protests in his
judgement and stated that Katitu would serve 12 years in prison and 3 years
on probation in order to ‘satisfy his supporters that their cry has been taken
into account’.49 The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction and sentenced
him in early 2020.50 Katitu is presently serving the sentence in prison.

Under-protection at the urban margins

Many analysts have noted that the Kenyan criminal justice system is ineffec-
tive and inefficient and frequently fails the poor and marginalized members
of its society.51 Similarly, most of my interlocutors in Githurai saw the
criminal justice system—the police, the courts, and the prisons—as inef-
fective in dealing with crime and insecurity they faced. The police were
seen to be highly corrupt and ineffective, often showing up long after the
thieves had left or, in many cases, terrorizing the victims of crime.52 The
courts were not seen as an accessible avenue for justice by most of the peo-
ple I spoke to for this study. The few participants who spoke about the
courts saw them as distant, complex, and expensive, similar to the findings
by Olly Owen and Sara-Jane Cooper-Knock in their comparative study of
policing in Nigeria and South Africa.53 The courts were also not seen as
effective. Even where thieves were prosecuted, they often did not end up
going to prison because many cases often collapsed before conviction due
to lack of witnesses or police negligence, as Julia Hornberger describes in
her study on South Africa.54 Even the possibility of conviction was not
seen as resulting in the desired justice outcomes. The prisons were seen
as counter-productive, serving to harden criminals rather than reforming
them. The case of Mzito who was incarcerated at a Borstal institution for

47. Kenya Law, Republic v Veronica Gitahi & Issa Mzee, Judgement (M Muya), Criminal
Case 41 of 2014 (High Court of Kenya, Mombasa, 10 Feb 2016).
48. Kenya Law, Republic v Titus Ngamau Musila.
49. Ibid.
50. IPOA. Court of Appeal quashes killer cop’s petition for freedom. IPOA, 29 April
2020, <https://www.ipoa.go.ke/court-of-appeal-quashes-killer-cops-petition-for-freedom/>
(21 February 2021).
51. See, JM Migai Akech, ‘Public law values and the politics of criminal (in)justice: Creating
a democratic framework for policing in Kenya’, Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal
5, 2 (2005), pp. 1472–9342.
52. Focus Group, bodaboda riders, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
53. Sarah Jane Cooper-Knock and Olly Owen, ‘Between vigilantism and bureaucracy:
Improving our understanding of police work in Nigeria and South Africa’, Theoretical
Criminology 19, 3 (2015), pp. 355–75.
54. Hornberger, ‘From general to commissioner to general’.
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house break-ins and met other boys who were engaged in armed robbery
whose gang he joined after they were released is illustrative.55 As a result,
Githurai residents felt that the criminal justice system did not protect them
adequately against thieves.
In her work, Teresa Caldeira notes that the under-protection of commu-
nities by the state in contexts marked by high levels of crime and insecurity
leads people to seek alternative ways of generating security and justice
outcomes.56 The concept of under-protection refers to the failure of the
police to provide a satisfactory level of protection when these people are
the victims of a crime or when they think they are likely to be victims
of a crime.57 In such a context, as noted above, people rely on various
forms of community vigilantism (such as mob justice or vigilante groups)
and/or police vigilantism. However, community vigilantism suffers from
significant limitations.
Mob justice is so common in Githurai that most of my interlocutors
recalled witnessing and participating in several incidents. In one notable
example, Wambua, a bodaboda rider, recalled an incident where a sus-
pected thief was beaten and so badly injured that both of his legs had to be
amputated.58 However, even though many respondents saw mob justice
as an appropriate and even necessary way of handling crime, many were
unwilling to participate in it. Some of them feared the potential individual
repercussions of such a prosecution that could emanate from participat-
ing in such violence that is illegal.59 Others also noted that the claims of
the accusers were not always accurate and could sometimes lead people to
attack innocent people. Tembo, a bus driver, recalled participating in mob
justice against a person who had been wrongly accused of theft while the
actual thief had long fled the scene.60 While many people said that they
will still join in the chase and attack the thieves, especially when they do
not think they can be identified, many of them preferred a better solution.
Scholars have argued that vigilante groups are often popular as an alter-
native to the state police because they are easily accessible, cheap, and also
often take a restorative approach to justice that goes beyond punishing the
thieves to also recover stolen goods.61 However, these groups often become
the source of much insecurity and anxiety in the communities where they
operate as was the case in Githurai in the 1990s and early 2000s when

55. Interview, Mzito, Githurai, 29 March 2015.

56. Caldeira, ‘The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil’, p. 51.
57. Louis Kushnick, ‘Over policed and under protected’: Stephen Lawrence, institutional
and police practices’, Sociological Research Online 4, 1(1999), pp. 1–11.
58. Focus Group, bodaboda riders, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
59. Ibid.
60. Interview, Tembo, Githurai, 25 March 2015.
61. Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock. ‘Policing in intimate crowds: Moving beyond the mob in
South Africa’, African Affairs 113, 453 (2014), pp. 563–82.
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Kamjesh and Mungiki fought over control of bus routes and termini in
Nairobi.62 The control of bus routes and termini was a major lifeline for
these groups because they levied fees on all public transport vehicles ply-
ing the routes they controlled. While Mungiki seemed to have gained much
territory elsewhere, they lost the brutal contest in Githurai to Kamjesh.63
Analysts have noted that the engagement of these vigilante groups with the
state fluctuates between support and brutal repression.64 A notable exam-
ple here is Mungiki in Kenya, which was co-opted by political elites and
subsequently brutally repressed by the state.65 Kamjesh, which won the
control of Githurai, collapsed following brutal repression of the vigilante
groups by the government and reforms to the public transport sector that
made it difficult for them to collect money from the public service vehicles.
As such, unlike some other areas at the margins of City of Nairobi, Githu-
rai did not have a legitimate vigilante group that people could rely on to
resolve theft cases.
Due to the constraints on community vigilantism—both vigilante groups
and mob justice — people often rely on the state police, despite their short-
comings, to deal with crime and insecurity ‘off-the-books’.66 In her study
on policing in Mozambique, Helene Maria Kyed notes that people reported
cases to the police with no intention of having the matters taken to court.67
Similarly, most of the people in Githurai who reported matters to the police
were often looking for the police officers to resolve the disputes conclusively
rather than taking the matters to court as the law anticipates. In contrast
to the courts, the police were seen as being more accessible. Police sta-
tions are close to the neighbourhoods, meaning that people did not have
to spend much time and money to get there. In many cases, they could
simply walk there. Some people also had personal contact with police offi-
cers whom they could call directly on their cell phones to help them resolve
conflicts.68 Further, the procedures and language that the police used were
much easier to understand, compared to the more complex procedures and
arcane legal language that is used in the courts. Furthermore, dealing with
the police was much cheaper than going to the courts because there are no
formal fees to pay and there was no need to hire lawyers. Even though the

62. See Musambayi Katumanga, ‘A city under Siege: Banditry & modes of accumulation in
Nairobi, 1991–2004’, Review of African Political Economy 32, 106 (2005), pp. 505–20.
63. Interview, Mzito, 29 March 2015, Majengo.
64. Jimam Lar, ‘Historicizing vigilante policing in Plateau State, Nigeria’, in J. Beek, M.
Gopfert, O. Owen, & J. Steinberg (eds), Police in Africa: A street level view (Hurst & Company,
London, 2017), pp. 79–100.
65. Peter M. Kagwanja, ‘Facing Mount Kenya or facing Mecca? The Mungiki, ethnic vio-
lence and the politics of the Moi succession in Kenya, 1987–2002’, African Affairs 102, 406
9 (2003), pp. 25–49.
66. Cooper-Knock and Owen, ‘Between vigilantism and bureaucracy.’
67. Helene Maria Kyed, ‘Inside the Police Stations in Maputo city’.
68. Group interview, market women, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
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police expected to be bribed, the bribe was often paid by the perpetrator
of the crime and not the victim. Naliaka recalled that when she reported a
young man who had stolen her phone to the police, they made him return
it to her, pay for the taxi that ferried the police officers who went to arrest
him, and also give them kitu kidogo (something small), a bribe.69
In the absence of an effective accountability mechanism, the justice that
police dispense ‘off-the-book’ can be problematic and uncertain. People
complained about police corruption, an issue that has been widely noted
in literature,70 claiming that the police took bribes and released suspects
soon after arrest.71 Others said that bribes could even turn cases around so
that the aggrieved party becomes the accused; turning ‘black into white’ as
Olly Owen terms it in his study of policing in Nigeria.72 This made people
fear reporting matters to the police because the thieves could return to
hurt them once they were released.73 When procedural justice backfires in
contexts such as Githurai that are marked by under-protection by the state
police, it can be dangerous. Others suspected that police officers colluded
with the thieves. These suspicions were often fuelled by the failure of the
police to intervene in instances where people reported their victimization
to them. For instance, Kevin, a middle-aged bodaboda rider, described how
police officers on patrol refused to intervene when he reported to them that
he had been robbed a short distance from where they were.74 He concluded
that they must have been working together. I return to this later.

Wazaliwa as a persistent threat

Githurai is commonly perceived as a highly insecure place and, indeed,
most of the residents that I spoke to believed that the level of crime in
their neighbourhood was very high. All respondents to the study could
remember falling victim to, witnessing, or hearing of a crime in the three
months preceding our conversation. The main crimes they noted were
street crimes, such as muggings and snatching of belongings and a few
cases of house break-ins. As a result, many people’s lives were marked by
a significant fear of crime.
Some of my interlocutors seemed to rely on two broad social categories:
wazaliwa and watu wa kukuja to understand the patterns of crime and vic-
timization in Githurai. The term wazaliwa75 referred to the people whose
families were the original settlers in Githurai, while watu wa kukuja76 refers

69. Interview, Naliaka, Githurai, 13 April 2015.

70. See, Akech, ‘Public law values and the politics of criminal (in)justice.’
71. Interview, Rehema, 26 March 2015.
72. Olly Owen, An institutional ethnography of the Nigerian Police Force (University of Oxford,
unpublished DPhil thesis, 2013).
73. Interview, Rehema, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
74. Focus Group, bodaboda riders, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
75. Swahili meaning those who were born here.
76. Swahili meaning those who came or newcomers.
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to those who moved into Githurai after the early years of the settlement,
finding the wazaliwa there. In the interviews, however, I noticed that these
terms were used in nuanced ways. For instance, the wazaliwa tended to
use the terms in the original sense; wazaliwa to describe themselves and
watu wa kukuja to describe the newcomers. However, the rest of the com-
munity did not use this term watu wa kukuja (hereafter ‘newcomer’) to
describe themselves, but they deployed the term wazaliwa to describe the
people whom they saw as the perpetrators of crime in the area. In particu-
lar, I noted that people used the term wazaliwa to describe young men like
Oscar whom they also described as kichwa ngumu (hard headed) or mwizi
sugu (toughened criminals).
People also seemed to believe that the ‘newcomers’ were the main tar-
get of crime. As such, people like Caleb, a student at Kenyatta University
that neighbours Githurai, who was mugged just days after moving into the
area,77 or Rehema, a middle-aged woman and market trader, who had had
to move her family from Githurai after being repeatedly attacked by rob-
bers in their home,78 understood their victimization in these terms. The
corollary here was the belief that wazaliwa were hardly ever victimized. In
reality, however, the wazaliwa were also sometimes victimized by thieves.
For instance, Mzito, the self-identified reformed armed robber, recalled
being chased one evening by some young men who were intent on steal-
ing from him as he was returning home from work.79 Crucially, people
seemed to believe that the thieves who terrorized them were predominantly
wazaliwa young men. And indeed some of the wazaliwa young men that I
spoke to admitted that they, and others they knew, were involved in theft
and robbery.80 However, they also noted that their gangs were not entirely
comprised of wazaliwa young men, but they included both wazaliwa and
newcomer youth, both young men and young women.81 The view of the
wazaliwa young men as the criminals was therefore inaccurate.
Some of my interlocutors also used the term wazaliwa to refer to the
people who lived in Majengo, the most deprived area of Githurai. While it
is true that many of the wazaliwa lived in Majengo, living there had more
to do with one’s economic ability rather than whether they were wazaliwa
or ‘newcomers’. For instance, many new entrants into Githurai—including
university students—start out by living in Majengo where housing is more
affordable. At the same time, some of the wazaliwa who had acquired more
economic resources also moved out of the area. However, this association
of wazaliwa with Majengo persisted.

77. Interview, Caleb, Githurai, 13 April 2015.

78. Interview, Rehema, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
79. Interview, Mzito, Githurai, 29 March 2015.
80. Interview, Sibi, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
81. Interview, Mzito, Githurai, 29 March 2015.
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The persistence of this link between wazaliwa and Majengo is helpful
to understand how people saw crime and victimization in Githurai. This
link provided people, especially the ‘newcomers’, with a frame through
which people could link the behaviour of the young men whom they saw
as a threat to them, to that of their parents whom they saw as rich and
powerful.82 The idea that the wazaliwa families, who lived in the most
deprived area of Githurai, were rich emanated from the fact that many
of them owned the plots of land on which they lived while most Githurai
residents were tenants.83 Thus, the term wazaliwa enabled people to go
beyond individuals like Oscar and encompass their families in their analy-
sis of the crime and insecurity. As a result, some of my interlocutors argued
that wazaliwa young men became thieves because they were spoilt and lazy
and were unwilling to work hard to earn their money like other people,
instead preferring to steal from others.84 They argued that their parents
had not only failed to discipline them as children; they also continued to
frustrate efforts to punish them when they were caught stealing by brib-
ing the police to release them following arrest.85 Therefore, even though
the term wazaliwa did not actually map onto the empirical reality of the
perpetrators and victims of crime, people continued to use it as a frame
through which to understand the patterns of crime and victimization that
they seemed to observe. Wazaliwa young men were seen as a threat because
they fit the stereotype of thieves.
The discursive construction of wazaliwa young men as a persistent secu-
rity threat led many to believe that they deserved brutal punishment. This
is consistent with the argument advanced by Jacob Rasmussen that the
construction of Mungiki as a chronic and incurable menace to society legit-
imized state violence against them.86 Little wonder that young men such
as Oscar who were described as wazaliwa were seen as deserving to be
excluded from the community. This sentiment was captured by Irungu,
the manager of a local bus company, who cited a popular Gˉıkūyu idiom:
‘mūici ndagˉırˉıirwo gūikarania na andū’ (a thief should not live amongst
people).87
As noted above, the formal criminal justice system was seen as ineffective
in serving this purpose, as a result of which people relied on vigilan-
tism. However, due to the constraints on community vigilantism, police
vigilantism was the most suitable option. I turn to this next.

82. Focus Group, bodaboda riders, Githurai, 26 March 2015.

83. Ibid.
84. Interview, Irungu, Githurai, 19 March 2015.
85. Interview, Irungu, Githurai, 19 March 2015.
86. Jacob Rasmussen, The chameleon and the mugumo tree: The politics of the Kenyan Mungiki
movement (Roskilde University, unpublished PhD thesis, 2013).
87. Interview, Irungu, Githurai, 19 March 2015.
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Katitu the ‘Super Cop’
Police vigilantes, often referred to as ‘Super Cops’, are police officers who
take a violent approach to policing that often goes beyond the legal limits
of their power. They often emerge in contexts marked by high levels of fear
of crime and popular frustration with the formal criminal justice system.
Julia Hornberger argues that police vigilantes become popular because as
police officers, they possess some legitimacy deriving from their symbolic
representation of the state even when they operate outside the law.88 Sev-
eral ‘Super Cops’ have emerged in Kenya’s history with the most notable
being Patrick David Shaw, a British man who worked as a police reservist in
Nairobi in the 1970s and 1980s.89 Pat Shaw, as he was commonly known,
is reputed to have executed suspected criminals who failed to heed his
warnings to desist from crime or leave the city.90 He is a legendary figure,
and stories of his antics are a core part of the popular imaginary of polic-
ing in Kenya.91 Over the years, several other ‘Super Cops’ have emerged
in Nairobi, especially at its margins, including ‘Stupid’ in Kibera92 and
the infamous Rashid in Eastleigh and Mathare93 who seem to walk in his
footsteps.
Katitu had emerged as Githurai’s super cop, and his policing style also
seems to have borrowed significantly from Pat Shaw’s playbook. Several
of my interlocutors noted that Katitu would warn young men whom he
suspected to be involved in crime and ask them to leave the neighbourhood,
failing which he would punish them. He is said to have provided some with
bus fare to go to their rural homes. In one case, he was said to have given a
young man money to start a business so that he would stop stealing. Some
of the young men I interviewed said that they had received money from him
in order to leave Githurai. Sibi, a self-identified reformed criminal who was
now washing cars to earn a living, told me that he had been given money
by Katitu to leave Githurai.94 However, taking money to leave or to start
a business did not mean that people always followed Katitu’s instructions.
For instance, Sibi never left Githurai and people claimed that the young

88. Hornberger, ‘From general to commissioner to general’.

89. Hudson Gumbihi, ‘Nairobi’s Super Cops’, Standard Digital, 13 September 2013,
<https://www.sde.co.ke/article/2000114322/nairobi-s-super-cops> (10 May 2020).
90. See, for example, Smith, D. 2013. ‘Investigating Patrick Shaw: Kenya’s most
dreaded cop,’ Daily Nation, 25 March 2013, <https://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/dn2/Patrick-
Shaw/957860-1728956-15af8br/index.html> (10 May 2020).
91. Gumbihi, ‘Nairobi’s Super Cops’. <https://www.sde.co.ke/article/2000114322/nairobi-
s-super-cops> (10 May 2020).
92. Michelle Osborn, Authority in Nairobi slum: Chiefs and bureaucracy in Kibera (University
of Oxford, unpublished DPhil thesis, 2012).
93. Dickens Olewe, ‘How Facebook is being used to profile and kill Kenyan “gangsters”’,
BBC News, 17 April 2019, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-47805113> (10 May
2020).
94. Interview, Sibi, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
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man that Katitu had given money to start a business had soon returned
to crime.95 Nonetheless, these claims had built Katitu’s popularity and
earned him legitimacy amongst the residents of Githurai. In the eyes of
many of my interlocutors, the young men who failed to follow Katitu’s
instructions deserved his ruthless punishment because, as Mzito put it, ‘he
had offered them the opportunity to change’.96 Indeed, these young men
were often subjected to brutal punishment by Katitu. For instance, when
Katitu caught Sibi with some stolen scrap metal, he beat him up so badly
that he could not walk for days.97
Katitu had distinguished himself from other police officers and the
police, the institution for which he worked, because he was seen as doing
something about crime. He was reputed to respond quickly to distress calls
unlike ‘the police’ who always arrived long after the thieves had left.98 The
people also believed that Katitu investigated cases that were reported to
him ‘properly’; that is, ‘he investigated matters before acting’ as Tembo,
the bus driver, put it.99 By ‘investigating properly’, Tembo was referring to
the unorthodox ways in which Katitu was rumoured to have investigated
crime—he was said to have occasionally dressed like a woman, presenting
himself as a potential victim, and ventured into dark alleys where thieves
lurked in order to flush them out.100 Whether true or not, many people
believed these claims, strengthening their belief that anyone that Katitu
killed had to have been a thief. The conviction in Katitu’s ability to identify
thieves was such that even some of Kimani’s friends who did not think that
he was a thief while he was alive seemed to have accepted the claim because
he was killed by Katitu.101
Katitu also projected himself as being incorruptible, and many of my
interlocutors believe him. A young man named Josiah was quoted in the
press saying that ‘[Katitu] was not taking bribes like the other officers’,102
and some of my interlocutors made similar claims.103 However, some of
my interlocutors, especially those who self-identified as wazaliwa, were
suspicious of these narratives. They believed that Katitu was also cor-
rupt with the only difference being that he did not collect money from
those he arrested but he was paid protection money by the owners of the
big businesses in Githurai.104 They claimed that this was the reason why

95. Interview, Tembo, Githurai, 25 March 2015.

96. Interview, Mzito, Githurai, 29 March 2015.
97. Interview, Tembo, Githurai, 25 March 2015.
98. Focus Group, bodaboda riders, Githurai, 26 March 2015.
99. Interview, Tembo, Githurai, 25 March 2015.
100. This point was emphasized by many respondents.
101. Interview, Naliaka, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
102. Karanja, ‘Githurai Residents Demand Release of Officer.’
103. Interview, Kennedy, Githurai, 18 March 2015.
104. Interview, Sibi, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
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the business owners organized the three-day street protests demanding his
release. Irungu, the manager of the bus company, confirmed that he was
amongst the organizers of the protests and that they often gave Katitu
money to ‘appreciate the good work he was doing’.105
Others suspected that Katitu was even more corrupt, not just taking pro-
tection money from business owners, but also working with the thieves as
well. As Sibi put it, ‘he was eating from both sides’.106 Hence, they argued
that if Katitu knew who the thieves were, it was not because of superior
investigation skills but rather because he worked with them. The suspicion
of police collusion with thieves looms large in the imaginary of policing
in Kenya and has been noted by analysts before.107 Mzito’s recollections
that they often hired guns and bullets from some police officers, during
the time when he was involved in armed robbery, seemed to validate these
suspicions.108 He said that some police officers would replace the gun they
recovered from shootouts against armed robbers with fake ones (bonoko)
and keep the real ones to hire out to thieves. This, he argued, was how
they avoided detection, which would be easy if they hired out their officially
issued guns. People often suspect that police officers in Kenya execute the
thieves they have been working with when it becomes risky for them or
when they want to demonstrate that they are ‘fighting crime’. This theme
is well explored in the popular Kenyan film Nairobi Half Life.109 Therefore,
some people believed that when Katitu killed a young man, it was not to
deal with crime but rather to punish those who did not meet their end of
the bargain with him.110
While most of my interlocutors seemed to accept Oscar’s death as war-
ranted, many people struggled to understand Kimani’s death. Even those
who accepted the possibility that Kimani may have been a thief did not
believe that snatching phones was enough reason for Katitu to kill him.
They speculated that his death could have resulted from a disagreement
over money from a big ‘job’, referring to a robbery. Esther, one of Kimani’s
childhood friends wondered, ‘there are many young people who snatch
phones at the roadside. Why only shoot Kimani?,111
Even so, many residents of Githurai, concerned about the crime and
insecurity they experienced, believed that dealing with thieves ruthlessly
was the way to resolve the problem. They also believed that Katitu was

105. Interview, Irungu, Githurai, 19 March 2015.

106. Interview, Sibi, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
107. E. A, Gimode, ‘An anatomy of violent crime and insecurity in Kenya: The case of
Nairobi, 1985–1999’, Africa Development 26, 1&2 (2001), pp. 295–335.
108. Interview, Mzito, Githurai, 29 March 2015.
109. David ‘Tosh’ Gitonga, Nairobi Half Life (One Fine Day Films, Nairobi, 2012).
110. Interview, Sibi, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
111. Interview, Esther, Githurai, 13 April 2015.
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the person they could depend on to do that in a context marked by under-
protection by the state police and the entire criminal justice system. As
such, it matters less whether the claims about what Katitu did are truth
or myth, what matters is that people believed them. In fact, some people
claimed that the security situation had worsened since his arrest as some
of the ‘dangerous young men he had chased away had returned’.112 There-
fore, Githurai residents went to the streets to express their support for
Katitu’s approach to policing, even where it was beyond the limit of the
law, because they saw him as the antidote to a criminal justice system that
failed to protect them.

Conclusion
Much of the extant literature on policing in Africa adopts a binary
approach, distinguishing between state and non-state policing. Through
a detailed examination of the empirical reality of policing in Githurai, I
challenge this binary by centring my analysis on the figure of a police vigi-
lante who straddles both categories. I show that the police vigilante enjoys
more popular support compared to both the state and non-state policing
mechanisms, and their approaches to crime and insecurity, whose legiti-
macy is noted to be limited and contingent. I agree with Julia Hornberger’s
argument that police vigilantes are able to enjoy this support because they
are able to operate with the efficiency of a vigilante group while enjoying
the legitimacy of being state officers that the mechanisms of community
vigilantism often lack. I present the police vigilante as an example of the
innovations that people at the urban margins generate to address problems
they face, such as crime and insecurity, in the absence of adequate and
reliable services by the state. Further, I show that these innovations have
an impact on the people’s perceptions of the state interventions that appear
to disregard their lived experiences. As such, the protests against Katitu’s
arrest need to be understood, not protests against police accountability per
se, but as against the interference of a state that has failed to protect peo-
ple in the local security management systems that people see as effective
and efficient. This suggests that the legitimacy of any interventions by pol-
icy actors will often be viewed through the lenses of innovative solutions
that people have generated at the grassroots. As such, this study shows that
police reforms or any policy reforms for that matter, no matter how well
intentioned, should not be taken for granted.

112. Interview, Tembo, Githurai, 25 March 2015.