There are newspaper headlines that report the news, and then there are those that seem, quite unintentionally, to open an ancient page of Scripture and allow its words to stride into the present. “KILLINGS SHOCK,” screams The Standard. Beneath that enormous headline lies an even more chilling figure: 3,985 Kenyans reported to have died in police hands since 2022. And suddenly, across two thousand years, the words of Jesus Christ seem to walk straight into the photograph: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy” (John 10:10). The resemblance is uncanny, not because Scripture should be casually converted into a political slogan, nor because Christ’s words should be crudely fastened upon any particular individual, but because the vocabulary of destruction has acquired such an uncomfortable contemporary echo that one cannot encounter those three verbs and then contemplate the reported condition of our policing without feeling their terrible resonance.
Look carefully at the imagery. An officer stands immaculate in ceremonial uniform, hand raised in salute, while behind him the artist has rendered a landscape of skulls and graves bearing the words HUMAN RIGHTS, FREEDOM, DIGNITY. The contrast is almost unbearable. On one side, polished brass, braided cord, pressed uniform, ceremony and institutional majesty. On the other, the symbolic graveyard of the very things that public authority exists to defend. The uniform salutes while the tombstones speak. And beneath all that splendour sits a number that refuses to salute anybody: 3,985. It simply sits there, stubborn and accusing, demanding that beyond the pageantry, uniforms, commissions, speeches and promises, somebody confront the human reality represented by the arithmetic.
That is where John 10:10 becomes haunting. Steal. Kill. Destroy. A thief steals possessions, certainly, but there are things infinitely more precious that can be stolen from a people: their security, their liberty, their confidence in institutions, their expectation that encountering an armed servant of the State should produce reassurance rather than terror. A society can have its peace stolen, its confidence stolen, its freedom stolen and, eventually, its very expectation of justice stolen. And when human beings die unlawfully at the hands of those commissioned to protect them, something else is destroyed alongside the life itself: public trust. The badge remains. The command structure remains. The vehicles, stations, ceremonies and salutes remain. But the moral covenant between citizen and State begins to bleed.
This is precisely why allegations of police brutality are infinitely more serious than ordinary criminal violence. A criminal carries no constitutional commission to protect you. The police do. A criminal has sworn no oath to uphold the constitutional order. The police have. A criminal does not approach the citizen clothed in the authority, weaponry and coercive machinery of the Republic. The police do. The policeman therefore carries not merely a firearm but a constitutional trust, and when that weapon or authority is unlawfully turned against the citizen, the betrayal is double jeopardy: a human being is violated, and the Constitution itself is wounded. For the Constitution does not establish an armed fraternity licensed to terrorise the population. Article 244 demands professionalism and discipline, transparency and accountability, compliance with constitutional standards of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the fostering of relationships with the broader society. The constitutional policeman is therefore not the citizen’s predator. He is supposed to be his protector.
And perhaps the most disturbing words on that newspaper cover are not even the enormous “KILLINGS SHOCK.” They are the smaller ones: “culture of impunity remains unchanged.” Because an unlawful killing is horrifying; a culture in which unlawful killing can persist is something considerably darker. Culture means repetition. Culture means habits hardening into systems. Culture means wrongdoing becoming sufficiently familiar that yesterday’s outrage can survive today’s commission, tomorrow’s task force and next month’s reform announcement. It means a country periodically recoiling before another corpse, demanding answers, receiving assurances, appointing committees, issuing reports, waiting, forgetting, and eventually recoiling before another corpse. At some point, therefore, the question ceases to be whether particular incidents occurred and becomes whether something deeper has taken residence within the institution itself. Scripture warns of precisely such moral inversion: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20).
Then comes the terrible irony. We speak endlessly of police reform. New structures. New committees. New recommendations. New equipment. New uniforms. New announcements. New ceremonies. Yet reform worthy of the name cannot principally concern the appearance of the officer; it must concern the character and conduct of the institution. You may tailor the smartest uniform on earth, polish every button until it reflects the morning sun, braid the ceremonial cord magnificently and parade the force before television cameras, but if citizens continue disappearing, being brutalised or dying unlawfully, you have merely dressed the problem magnificently. Christ warned against precisely this obsession with outward splendour concealing inward decay when He spoke of things appearing beautiful outwardly while being “within full of dead men’s bones” (Matthew 23:27). The analogy is moral, not literal, but the principle is devastatingly clear: appearance cannot redeem corruption of substance.
For government exists under an entirely opposite biblical principle. Paul describes legitimate authority as “God’s minister to thee for good” (Romans 13:4). Peter similarly places governors within an order intended “for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (1 Peter 2:14). Authority, therefore, is morally justified by what it protects. The sword entrusted to the State is not supposed to wander indiscriminately among the innocent; it is entrusted to authority so that wickedness may be restrained and ordinary men and women may live peaceably, securely and with dignity. Indeed, Paul urges prayer for rulers precisely “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Timothy 2:2). The biblical conception of government is therefore profoundly protective. Power is entrusted so that life may flourish beneath it, not so that citizens must learn how to survive encounters with it.
And herein lies the great moral danger whenever impunity becomes institutional. Power possesses an extraordinary capacity to forget why it was given. The servant slowly begins imagining himself the master; the custodian begins behaving like the owner; the sword forgets the hand that constitutionally authorised it. Scripture repeatedly warns rulers against this intoxication. “By me kings reign, and princes decree justice” (Proverbs 8:15). Notice the final word: justice. Not terror. Not arbitrary violence. Not disappearance. Not immunity from accountability. Justice. And when power departs from justice, the ancient warning of Ecclesiastes becomes painfully relevant: “If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter” (Ecclesiastes 5:8). Scripture knew long before modern constitutionalism that institutions themselves can become instruments of oppression when those entrusted with authority cease remembering that authority is a stewardship.
Yet the Republic must never surrender to the idea that brutality is somehow the inevitable price of maintaining order. That is a false choice. A police service can be firm without being murderous, armed without being lawless, disciplined without being brutal, feared by criminals without becoming feared by innocent citizens. Indeed, the highest expression of professional policing is not the ability to unleash force but the disciplined capacity to possess enormous coercive power and exercise it lawfully, proportionately and accountably. “He that ruleth his spirit [is better] than he that taketh a city” (Proverbs 16:32). Self-control is not weakness. Under constitutional government, it is one of the supreme marks of legitimate strength.
And that brings us back to Christ’s extraordinary sentence. John 10:10 does not end with the thief. After stealing, killing and destroying, Jesus presents the magnificent opposite: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” There are, therefore, two trajectories contained within that single verse. One moves towards fear, deprivation, death and destruction. The other moves towards life. One scatters. The other gathers. One devours. The other protects. One turns human beings into casualties. The other restores their dignity. Every institution exercising coercive power, and every government commanding such an institution, should therefore periodically stand before that verse as before a mirror and ask itself a brutally simple question: Which direction are our footprints pointing?
For eventually statistics acquire names. Numbers acquire mothers. Graphs acquire graves. Reports acquire widows. Behind every neat figure printed in a task-force document lies somebody who once woke up, dressed, laughed, worked, loved somebody, worried about something, planned tomorrow and expected to return home. Somewhere behind the statistics may stand a mother who still listens for footsteps that will never return, a child who cannot understand why a parent disappeared, a spouse staring at an empty chair, a family moving painfully between police stations, mortuaries, courtrooms and government offices looking not for rhetoric but for truth. Scripture captures the moral gravity of innocent blood with frightening economy: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). Blood, in the biblical imagination, does not disappear merely because paperwork is completed, headlines fade or public attention moves elsewhere. It cries.
3,985 is therefore not merely a number to be printed in yellow ink beneath a dramatic headline. If that figure withstands scrutiny, it is 3,985 reasons for the Republic to interrogate its conscience. It is 3,985 reasons to ask whether reform has penetrated beyond uniforms, committees and communiqués into training, command, discipline, accountability and the sanctity with which the State regards human life. It is 3,985 reasons to remember that the first duty of those entrusted with the sword is not to demonstrate that they possess it, but to justify, every day, why a constitutional democracy continues entrusting it to them.
And so that newspaper cover becomes more than journalism. It becomes an uncomfortable mirror held before the Republic: the immaculate officer in the foreground, the symbolic graveyard behind him, and those terrible words hovering over the entire scene: KILLINGS SHOCK. Then, from an entirely different age and context, comes that ancient voice from Galilee: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.” We must not abuse the verse by turning metaphor into reckless identification. But neither should we become so sophisticated that we refuse to recognise a moral resemblance when the fruits themselves begin arranging the vocabulary before our eyes. For Christ Himself taught that “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20).
When the vocabulary surrounding those entrusted with protecting life begins, with disturbing frequency, to resemble steal, kill and destroy, perhaps the nation should stop admiring the uniform for a moment and listen carefully to the echo.
For an echo that persistent may be telling us something