Community-Policing in Kikuyu : Assessing the need for organizational change within a Police department from an institutional approach.

Abstract: Focusing on a community-policing pilot-project initiated in Kikuyu, a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, the current paper seeks to create an understanding concerning local premises for community-policing implementation. It is based on a field study that combined participatory observations and semi-structured interviews to investigate how the management of the pilot-project on the one side and the local police officers on the other side perceives the latter’s professional duty in Kikuyu. These perceptions and their correlation were analyzed through an institutional approach, involving regulative, normative and culture-cognitive perspectives. Initially, the findings show that intentions held within the management about how to change police practice in Kikuyu correlated to a large degree with the understanding local police officers already posses concerning their professional duty. However, applying the institutional approach, possible discrepancies were found. Concerning this, while the regulative and normative aspects of how to police Kikuyu seem to correlate between the two groups, differences on the culture-cognitive level indicate that the management and the local police officers have differing perceptions concerning police practice. Conclusively, following a distinction between a proactive approach to policing, expressed by the management, and a reactive approach to policing, expressed by the local police officers, the paper issues a warning regarding how historical and current social structures might result in a misinterpretation and misuse of community-policing on the side of the local police officers, which could lead to contradictive and counterproductive end results following the continued implementation of community-policing.