Professionalising Peripheral Police Officers in Kenya: Implications For Curriculum Development

Abstract

Management of non-professional Peripheral Police Officers (PPOs) has continued to pose a challenge to the Government of Kenya. The PPOs’ arbitrary recruitment, lack of training, lack of standard operating procedures and vulnerability to political manipulation, among other factors, limit their ability to effectively discharge their duties as police officers. Consequently, the PPOs have been chiefly blamed for the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the country, especially among the pastoralist communities, a phenomenon that has escalated the rate of crime in the country. In order to address the scourge, the government has put in place a training policy meant to professionalise the PPOs so they can effectively play a complementary role in delivering policing services to the citizenry. The objective of this study was to carry out a training needs analysis in order to develop a curriculum and training manual that would be used in implementing the training policy. The study adopted an Organisation-Task-Person model and found that, whereas the training needs point towards a traditional law enforcement curriculum, the stakeholders expect a postmodern force orientated towards community policing. Given the officers’ semiliterate background, the dilemma is not so much delivering the much-desired traditional curriculum as reorienting the curriculum towards community policing. Using the Goldstein (1987) and Wong (2009) models of community policing, the study recommends a hybrid broad-based curriculum model, which combines both the traditional and postmodern aspects into a “partnership policing training model”

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n13p781