In Mathare, in Mukuru, in Kayole, in Kondele, in Majengo - in every informal settlement and working-class neighbourhood in Kenya - people know something about the police that the powerful prefer not to discuss.

They know that the police do not come to protect them.

They know this not because they are cynical, or because they are criminals, or because they misunderstand the function of law enforcement. They know it because they have lived it - across generations, across administrations, across the entire arc of Kenya's post-independence history. The raids at 2am. The boys taken and not returned. The bullets fired into crowds of young people demanding dignity. The silence of institutions that were supposed to investigate, and prosecute, and deliver justice.

They know it because the Kenya Police Force was never built to protect them. It was built, in 1906, to protect an empire.

The Kenya Police Force was not built to protect the people of Mathare, of Kibera, or of any informal settlement in Kenya. It was built to serve colonial power. That founding violence has never been confronted - and it has never left.
 

The Colonial Origin of Kenyan Policing

The Kenya Police Force was formally established under British colonial administration in 1906, though its paramilitary predecessors operated from the 1890s under the Imperial British East Africa Company. Its founding mandate had nothing to do with public safety in any civic sense. It existed to enforce the instruments of colonial extraction: the hut tax and poll tax that forced Africans into wage labour; the Kipande identity pass system that controlled the movement of every African male over sixteen; the suppression of labour unrest on settler farms; and the violent breaking of community resistance to British rule.

Punitive expeditions - in which armed forces were sent to collectively punish entire communities for resistance - were standard colonial police practice. The Nandi, the Giriama, the Kikuyu, and communities across the territory experienced this violence not as aberration but as the consistent, deliberate policy of a colonial state that viewed African lives as subordinate to imperial interest.

When Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963, this institution was not dismantled. It was inherited — its structure, its culture of impunity, its relationship to communities as subjects to be controlled rather than citizens to be served — carried forward almost entirely intact. Successive post-independence governments found a brutalized, hierarchical, accountability-free police force useful for maintaining their own power. The Kenyatta era, the Moi era, and governments since have all made use of it.

The 2024/25 Gen Z protests made this inheritance visible to the world. More than sixty young Kenyans were killed by police. Hundreds were injured. Scores were abducted in the night. The world watched. Impunity continued. As of this writing, not a single officer has faced meaningful prosecution for those killings.

More than sixty young Kenyans were killed by police during the 2024 protests. Hundreds were injured. Scores were abducted. As of today, not a single officer has faced meaningful prosecution. This is not a broken system. This is a system working exactly as its founders designed it to work.
 

This Is Not About Bad Individuals

The argument of this petition is not that Kenya's police officers are uniquely evil people. It is that the institution they serve was built for colonial purposes, has been used by post-colonial governments as an instrument of control, and operates within an architecture of deliberate impunity that makes structural violence the predictable outcome - regardless of the character of individual officers.

The Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), established by the 2010 Constitution, receives thousands of complaints each year. Its prosecution record is negligible. Not because its staff lack dedication, but because the institution has been systematically underfunded, denied prosecutorial independence, and structurally positioned to investigate without the power to bring officers to court. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights faces similar budgetary neglect. Accountability institutions starved of resources are accountability institutions in name only.

The National Police Service Act 2011 - the law that should constrain how police use force - contains provisions so vague and so deferential to police discretion that they have been repeatedly used to retrospectively justify killings that should have been prosecuted as crimes. The law is not a brake on police violence. In its current form, it is a framework for licensing it.

These are not accidental failures. They are the predictable consequences of a political class that has, across generations, found the threat of police violence useful. To end police violence in Kenya requires confronting that political reality - and demanding that the National Assembly, the institution that makes the laws and controls the budget, act.

To end police violence in Kenya is to confront the political interests that depend on it. That is why this petition goes to Parliament. Laws must change. Budgets must change. The architecture of impunity must be dismantled by the institution that built it.
 

The Evidence Is Irrefutable

The scale and consistency of police violence in Kenya is not a matter of contested claim - it is a matter of verified, multi-source, multi-year documentation. The Missing Voices Coalition, which has been tracking extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, has recorded over 1,461 police killings and 423 enforced disappearances - against which fewer than 28 prosecutions have ever been initiated. In 2023 alone, the coalition documented 118 extrajudicial killings, with men aged 19 to 35 accounting for the majority of victims. In 2024, enforced disappearances surged by 450 percent - from 10 cases in 2023 to 55 - marking the highest number ever recorded by the coalition, with 58 of the 104 killings occurring in June and August alone during the Finance Bill protests. Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) reported in 2025, police killings rose a further 20 percent to 125 cases, with June and July again the deadliest months, accounting for 68 deaths linked to protest crackdowns - and shootings the most common method, recorded in 114 of those cases. The Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU), drawing on medical records, autopsy findings, and witness testimony, documented 67 deaths from 296 cases of torture and other ill-treatment during the 2023 protest crackdown - and their Silenced But Unbowed report on the 2024 protests recorded 63 confirmed deaths, 63 abductions, 26 missing persons, and over 600 injuries, sustained in what IMLU described as an entrenched culture of impunity within Kenya's security forces. OMCT reports that despite this documentation, the Director of Public Prosecutions has yet to open a single case of criminal liability against any member of Kenya's security forces for either the 2023 or 2024 crackdowns. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights - a government-established body - itself confirmed that sixty people died and 601 were injured during the June–July 2024 protests, and that 74 protesters were forcibly disappeared between June and November 2024, with 26 still unaccounted for, alongside 1,376 arbitrary arrests and 610 documented protest injuries. These numbers - drawn from Kenya's own human rights institutions and from civil society organizations with over three decades of forensic documentation - describe not a series of incidents but a system: a system that kills, disappears, and tortures with the reliable knowledge that accountability will not follow. That system has a name. It is colonial impunity. And it is the system this petition demands that the National Assembly dismantle.

The Constitutional Argument 

The Constitution of Kenya 2010 is unequivocal. Article 26 guarantees the right to life. Article 29 guarantees freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Article 37 guarantees the right to peaceful assembly and demonstration. Article 47 guarantees fair administrative action. Article 48 guarantees access to justice.

When police shoot unarmed protesters, they violate Article 26. When police torture detainees, they violate Article 29. When police disperse peaceful demonstrations with live ammunition, they violate Article 37. When families of victims are denied information, investigation, and redress, they are denied Articles 47 and 48.

Police violence in Kenya is not merely a policy failure. It is a pattern of constitutional violation — systematic, ongoing, and sustained by the deliberate failure of the National Assembly to enact the legislative and budgetary frameworks the Constitution demands. This petition calls the National Assembly to account for that failure.

WE THEREFORE DEMAND THAT THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF KENYA:

I
Operationalize The National Coroners Service Act
 
We call on the National Assembly to fully operationalize The National Coroners Service Act (NCSA) 2017, which was enacted in Kenya to reform how deaths are investigated, particularly those involving police action, suspicious circumstances, or deaths in custody. Despite being law for nearly nine years, its implementation remains largely stalled, creating a significant gap in human rights accountability and forensic investigation. While the National Coroners Service (Amendment) Bill 2023 was introduced to address some technical hurdles, it has not yet fully bridged the gap to operationalization.
 

II
Mandate a Public Inquiry into Every Death Caused by Police Action
 
We call on the National Assembly to legislate a mandatory, automatic, and independent public inquiry into every instance where a person dies as a result of police action - including deaths in custody, deaths during operations, and deaths resulting from use of force. This inquiry must be completed within a defined statutory timeframe, must be publicly reported, and its findings must be acted upon. The current system, in which families must fight for years through unresponsive institutions to establish the facts of their loved one's death, is a violation of the constitutional right to dignity and the right to life enshrined in Article 26 of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.
 

III
Repeal and Replace the Excessive-Force Provisions of the National Police Service Act
 
We call on the National Assembly to conduct a comprehensive review of the National Police Service Act 2011 and to repeal or substantially amend every provision that permits, enables, or fails to adequately constrain the use of excessive force. Specifically: the Act must explicitly prohibit the use of live ammunition against unarmed civilian protesters; it must define the threshold for lethal force with constitutional precision; and it must establish clear, non-discretionary disciplinary consequences for violations. The current Act's provisions on use of force are insufficiently specific and have been repeatedly exploited to retrospectively justify killings that should have been treated as crimes. This purge on coloniality in Kenyan laws must also extend to the colonial penal code.
 

IV
Enshrine the Constitutional Right to Compensation for Victims of Police Violence
 
We call on the National Assembly to legislate an explicit, justiciable right to compensation for victims of police violence and the families of those killed by police action. Compensation must not be contingent on a criminal conviction - it must be available through a dedicated, accessible, and adequately funded reparations mechanism. The burden of proof in compensation proceedings must not fall on traumatized, often impoverished families who must navigate a legal system that has historically been hostile to their claims. Justice is not only about punishment of perpetrators. It is also about acknowledgement of harm and material reparation to those who have suffered it.
 

V
Guarantee Adequate Budgetary Allocation for IPOA, Witness Protection Agency and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights
 
We call on the National Assembly, in its budget-making function, to guarantee adequate, ring-fenced, and annually reviewed budgetary allocations to the Independent Policing Oversight Authority, Witness Protection Agency and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. Accountability institutions that are chronically underfunded are accountability institutions in name only. IPOA's case backlog, staffing shortfalls, and limited field capacity are direct consequences of deliberate budgetary neglect. The National Assembly must treat funding for police accountability as a constitutional obligation, not a discretionary line item to be managed downwards.
 

Why Your Signature Matters

Petitions alone do not change institutions. They never have. What petitions do - when they carry the weight of enough voices - is make the cost of inaction visible. They tell legislators that the people are watching, that the people are counting, that the people have specific demands and will not be satisfied with empty rhetoric about reform.

We are asking for 50,000 signatures from across Kenya. Not just from activists and lawyers and the constitutionally literate - though we welcome them. We are asking from residents of Mathare and Kibera and Kondele who have lived with this their entire lives. We are asking from the young people who marched in 2024 and were met with bullets. We are asking from parents who fear for their children every time there is a police operation in their neighbourhood. We are asking from every Kenyan who believes that a country cannot call itself a constitutional democracy while its parliament leaves the people without protection from the violence of the state.

The Kenya Police Force was built in 1906 by people who did not believe Kenyan lives mattered. Every year that passes without structural accountability is a year in which that belief is, in practice, sustained.

Sign this petition. Share it. And hold the National Assembly to account.

This is a grassroots led campaign organized by Mathare Infotech Lab, Kayole Community Justice Center, and Mukuru Community Justice Center.