Defund the police

Policing in postcolonial Kenya is at an impasse. What is needed is disinvestment from this system of repression and reinvestment in communities.

Photo by Kate Darmody on Unsplash

The African-American political activist and academic, Angela Davis, opens her seminal book Are Prisons Obsolete? with a discussion of how prisons have come to seem so “natural” that it is extremely hard to imagine a life without them. The same could be said of the police. We take up Davis’s question and apply it to the Kenyan police. Given the failures of Kenya’s police reform process, which we discuss in our ongoing research projects (see two examples here and here), the question being posed by many is: what comes next? Our answer is that there is a deep argument for the abolition of the Kenyan police altogether.

About the Author

Zoltán Glück is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, DC.

Wangui Kimari is on the editorial board of Africa Is a Country and participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Center.

Further Reading