It was sigh of relief and the start of rejoice, for families who had lost their kin due to extra judicial killings. Although the wounds are still open and hurting for the families. The disbandment of the Special Service Unit (SSU) has given a glimmer of hope to these families; that justice might finally be served. The SSU was a team formulated and relied on to solve complex crimes within the country.

“Ruto the way we voted for you. Kindly fight the issue of extra judicial killings,” a Mathare resident stated, on a local channel. The Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA) has received and processed over 20,979 complaints in its 11 years since it was established. But only 3,437 investigations have been completed.

According to Missing Voices Kenya, a consortium of human rights groups tracking extrajudicial killings; in 2020, police killed or abducted 167 people. “When confronted with human rights reports or media accounts, Kenyan authorities continue to either deny or dismiss the existence of what appears to be a government policy on enforced disappearances and police killings,” the group wrote in their 2020 annual report.

Human Rights groups and the families are calling upon the government to formulate a committee that will investigate and look into the extrajudicial killings within the police force. “With the government pronouncement. We believe that this an indication that there is political will to end extrajudicial killings in this country,”  Hussein Khalid Haki Africa.