A Kenyan provincial police officer shot 10 people dead at several bars in a small town of Nairobi. Peter Karanja, the officer gunman, went on the rampage after finishing his shift as a guard a district residence. The victims were killed indiscriminately and two of them were Karanja’s colleagues who were investigating the shootings. Karanja surrendered to the police after his attempt to shoot himself failed due to lack of bullets. The motivations behind the killings remain unclear, but the police have found two leads. One lead is that Karanja had discovered that he was infected with HIV and went to the bars in search of his girlfriend whom he suspected could have infected him with the virus. The other lead is that Karanja was angry over the news that his lover was having an affair with some person in one of those bars. Karanja had a poor disciplinary record, including a number of quarrels with his superiors.
This is another crime incident committed by somebody with a police background. The killer in the Philippines hijacking case was a former senior police officer while Karanja in the present case was a police officer (just off his daily duty). The two of them shared two things in common. The first thing is that both of them had easy access to guns and were well trained at using guns. The second thing is that they both had some bad disciplinary records. Although their intentions of killing innocents were different—one related to job and the other to personal reasons, the two cases clearly showed the great danger of police officers committing conventional crimes by abusing their power which is entrusted to them with the purpose of protecting the society.
Karanja’s case also illustrates the importance of assessing police officers’ mental health and self-control ability. Mere disciplinary actions are not enough to deal with a police officer’s misconducts. The fact that Karanja had been disciplined for offending his supervisor may well suggest that he had quick temper and low self-control capacity. In fact, his emotional problems have contributed to his act of shooting the 10 innocent people. If we look closer to the two leads suggested by police under investigation of the case, they were actually driven by revenge and jealousy respectively. A qualified police officer should never react to these emotions in the same way as Karanja did.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A60KO20101107
2 comments:
How often do you think an office should be screened for mental health? Sometimes people go through life completely normal and then all of a sudden snap due to a breakdown of some sort. Its scary to think that the people that are responsible for keeping others safe could so easily turn and threaten the lives of innocents.
It is hard to come to terms with the fact that people with power sometimes abuse that power and think they are above the law, for instance. It sounds like this officer just snapped and decided he was somehow in charge of who lives and who dies. It's sad.
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