DCI boss George Kinoti has once again assured Kenyans that crime against innocent civilians from the police will not go unsolved under his watch.
George Kinoti’s first call was priesthood, and that, probably, is the reason he always carries a rosary in his pocket. But it was at the police service, his second-choice career, that he received baptism by fire.
#DCI Kinoti, “I stand before God, if myself or anybody who will ever cover for someone who has killed an innocent person let God curse me. I am saying no one will ever cover for a police officer who kills under my watch.” pic.twitter.com/yVgzyeB1tk— DCI KENYA (@DCI_Kenya) February 28, 2019
It was while growing up in the crime-ridden slums of Makutano in Meru that his poor family caught the attention of Catholic Bishop Rt Rev Cyrus Njiru, the Bishop Emeritus of Meru who is now retired in Rome.
Mr Kinoti came from a poor family and his single mother did manual jobs. “We were deeply religious,” he tells me.
It was in the slums that he came across crime and police brutality. “They all looked like monsters and I was always wondering, can’t there be a civil face of the police?”
With the guidance of Bishop Njiru, the young Kinoti’s aspirations were limited and he wanted to become a priest and later join the Jesuit fathers of Sicily. He had by then graduated from St Pius X Seminary, regarded for the last 60 years as the seed-bed of priests in Meru, and where students live to the school motto of Sidera Tangam, Latin for ‘I will touch the stars’.
He assembled a few trusted officers, then scattered them all over the country, and asked them to start looking at all the cases that had piled up at the DCI over the years.
“I was shocked by the number of pending cases here; something had to be done. The DCI was a den of corruption and files moved or stalled depending on the amount paid,” he remembers.
In some of the first assignments, Mr Kinoti would go to the field with his junior officers to help them investigate cases and boost their morale.