Super Cops, Extrajudicial Killings, and Popular Imaginaries of Policing in Facebook Groups in NairobiPamela Chepngetich Mainye, Columbia UniversityResearch Grant, 2020 The overall goal of my research was to probe the continued public consent to extrajudicial killings by police through the lens of popular cultural forms in various Facebook groups in Nairobi. For several years, especially the period between 2015 and 2019, Facebook groups became important new spaces for mobilizing Eastlands Nairobi residents in “digital” community policing platforms, spaces which convened police, members of the public, and gangsters. In many ways, these Facebook groups provided insights into the complexity of policing “ungoverned” spaces, as well as into the construction and mobilization of opinion around extrajudicial killings of suspects. Central to the popularity of Facebook as a space to mobilize consent for extrajudicial killings is the phenomenon of “super cops.” “Super cops” describe an unorthodox yet deeply embedded form of urban policing in Kenya where specific police officers (mostly male), through a complex mix of public consent and state sanction, use extrajudicial killings to “manage” violent crime. This study proposed a methodology of digital ethnographic work, surveys and textual analysis, and moving beyond a human rights discourse, to identify and explain the (public) discourses, popular arts, and imaginaries that provided scaffolding and legitimacy for police extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Findings from the Facebook group discourse indicated that Facebook was primarily used in Eastlands (specifically in the Community Policing Groups run by police) to mobilize opinion around extrajudicial killings. Using metaphors, sloganeering, and specific appeals such as videos drawn from CCTV footage, the police were able to make a case for and give rationality to extrajudicial killings, despite scattered opposition to it as a “crude” policing method. Additionally, the online groups not only mainstreamed a specific security discourse whereby populist methods of dealing with violent crime are adopted but also legitimized it by giving it a sheen of public consent. This study proposed a methodology of digital ethnographic work, surveys and textual analysis, and moving beyond a human rights discourse, to identify and explain the (public) discourses, popular arts, and imaginaries that provided scaffolding and legitimacy for police extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Furthermore, Facebook discourse revealed the use of local metaphors that drew from the street lingua franca of sheng that excused, naturalized, and used flippancy to downplay extrajudicial killings of suspected gangsters. Accompanying the metaphors and stock phrases equating crime with disease and vermin is an abiding heroization and veneration of “super cops” through illustrations that take the format of Marvel superhero comics. These illustrations mask the illegality and sheer viciousness of the methods they endorse—and the reality that real people and real lives are at stake. Archival work that featured leading dailies in Kenya from the 1960s to the 2000s showed laudatory journalistic coverage of police-gangster encounters, where specific police (men) were celebrated for their ruthlessness. The modus operandi across these stories was similar, with a lone cop acting outside the boundaries of law, dispensing on-the-spot justice to suspected violent criminals. Journalists framed super cops as necessary evils, and as mysterious, and in many ways, altruistic figures. In summary, what appeared online in Facebook groups as crime discourse reflected public perceptions of crime, as well as circumstances that residents of Eastlands have adopted as their everyday lived reality across time. Additionally, while super cops were feared, venerated, and portrayed as mysterious in both online and print coverage, their continued existence is considered a necessary compromise that emerges from a broken judicial system, an urban space replete with crime and small arms, and a populace that desires to live with guarantees of security in an urban space where the reach of the state is weak.
