Abstract:
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.
