Why can't our own GPD do the same?

barney and fish struggle to find their inner muse

Looking for a good read? Don’t miss the Kenya police blotter.

NAIROBI—As a young teen, Mike Mugo would surreptitiously read crime novels from his father’s collection, lured by tales of tough-talking detectives and ruthless crooks and the gorgeous women whose pictures graced the paperback covers.

Which explains why Kenyan police crime reports read like 1940s pulp fiction.

Inspector Mugo, now 38 years old and head of communications for the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, is trying to soften the branch’s image by publicizing its successes in the style of his father’s detective novels.

The DCI, Kenya’s equivalent of the FBI, publishes daily reports on “undercover sleuths” engaging in gunfights with “armed thugs” in “dimly lit alleys” and how “our boys,” hot on the trail of a murderer, “smoked him out of his hideout at a lodging in the city.”

Such language—in tweets, Facebook posts and weekly cartoons—is the unit’s attempt to connect primarily with young people in rough neighborhoods of Nairobi and other cities, both criminals and victims who often see security forces as brutal and corrupt.

“It gives us a human face in the eyes of the public,” Mr. Mugo said.

“Our main targets are the audience who don’t have access to a newspaper, who don’t have TV, who don’t have radio, but they do have a smartphone,” Mr. Mugo said.  “We decided to speak and communicate in a language these people understand.”

There’s this recent account of a shootout with a gang of robbers: “Sounds of deafening gunfire reverberated in the air, rat-a-tat-tat-tat!!! as the undercover sleuths silenced the armed thugs in retaliation, after they defied orders to surrender and turned against our men.”

The suspects “slipped into the dimly lit alleys of Mariguini slums, their bodies riddled with bullet holes.”

There’s the tragic story of “a village Casanova” who carried on a torrid affair with his neighbor’s wife.

Late one night, the lover knocked on the woman’s door and shouted, “It’s me, your babe”—unaware that her husband had returned home earlier than expected. “A deafening silence followed as the man who was now seated on the bed digested the words in shock, looking down beside him where his wife lay without making a move,” the police recounted.

The Casanova knocked yet again, “with the impatience of a stallion,” the police said.

The cuckolded husband rushed to the door “with the rage of a wounded lion” and “crushed him like pounded fufu,” a starchy West African staple. The Casanova died from the beating; police arrested the husband.

A farmer who caught someone stealing his corn exacted “sweet revenge as he descended on the thug without consideration like a rented mule,” in the DCI’s telling. (Not to be confused with a different thief caught and beaten by neighbors “like a government mule.”)

Our men in blue used to put out a decent police blotter, full of details, if not color, but, like others around the country, it’s been pared down to a dull, limited recital of arrests, with nothing left of the content that used to make police blotters, along with obituaries, the most read sections of the daily newspapers, including Greenwich Times’.

I think we should drag GPD Folks out of retirement and put him at a typewriter, but if he won’t leave Florida, I’m tempted to take on the task myself.