By Billy Mijungu
Petty offences should never be a gateway to incarceration. Yet every day, minor infractions—real or imagined—are escalated by police action into arrests, remand, and needless suffering for ordinary citizens.
Justice cannot be delivered from a distance. Law enforcement must, in practice and perspective, be where the people are. Only then can public order reflect the lived realities of those it is meant to serve rather than punish.
An arrest may outwardly resemble enforcement of the law, but in many cases it becomes the gravest injustice. Procedure applied without context turns legality into oppression. When discretion is abandoned, the law ceases to be a shield and becomes a weapon.
Consider the common case of a boda boda rider arrested for obstruction after refusing or failing to pay a bribe.
Such allegations are nearly impossible to disprove. When these encounters are processed mechanically, they often culminate in fines or detention that devastate livelihoods.
These are citizens who live hand to mouth. A single night in custody means lost income, missed responsibilities, exposure to health risks, and sometimes permanent economic damage, all arising from petty and often unjustifiable offences.
Many end up paying more money to escape prolonged detention for crimes they did not commit or offences they cannot afford to contest. The predictable outcome is the entrenchment of corruption at police stations, where arrests become tools of extraction rather than instruments of public safety.
A bottom-up justice renaissance requires confronting these realities honestly. Public order must not be blind to poverty or deaf to power imbalances.
Discretion must be exercised with humanity, proportionality, and social awareness.
Law enforcement itself must be supported and reformed. Police officers should be equipped with modern accountability tools such as body cameras, rolling CCTV systems, and digital recording devices to objectively justify arrests and actions. It can no longer be a matter of one word against another. Evidence must be verifiable, transparent, and credible.
Public safety will not be achieved through punishment alone, but through accountability, empathy, and institutional integrity. A system that understands the street will better serve society.
