The director of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre Martin Kimani has now called for a closer collaboration between security agencies and the citizens in order for the world to defeat terrorism.
As part of the strategy to achieve this, Kimani challenged security agencies dealing with counter-terrorism to consider using the internet to reach a wide population on intelligence gathering.
Kimani was addressing the Council on global affairs in Chicago, United States where he said security agencies can take advantage of social media and other internet facilities to crackdown on terrorism.
He revealed that Kenyan security agencies have benefited greatly from a closer people-police relationship, commonly known as nyumba kumi in fighting crime and more so violent extremism.
He gave examples of the Kenyan scenario where increasingly, there are community-security agency forums where “they are able to sit down and discuss what are the issues right at the local level that are affecting us… issues like where does there seem to be recruitment going on, where is there incitement?… and a lot of time, citizens are ahead of the security services because they understand who these people are.”
“That is one of the promising areas that we have seen movement.”
“The amount of data coming from citizens to the security services in Kenya has quantitatively leaped because of this kind of approach,” he said.
By involving citizens, he said, they will take ownership of the insecurity mitigation measures put in place.
Which he said, can only be effective in an environment where there are no ethnic proliferation, tribalism, racism among other –isms socially frowned upon.
“One of the things that I hope could emerge from this conversation in Chicago is the need to go back to citizenship development, citizenship protection, and advocacy,” he asserted.
Security agencies also have the challenge of presenting a powerful counter-narrative against that of the terrorists, which is often appealing to youths and other marginalised groups, he pointed out.
The theme of the high-level conference was Planning for Disruption and Promoting Resilience in Cities across the World.
Also present was Former Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Service Bernard Hogan who shared his experiences in curbing security threats in a first world country.
“The good protection of everyone is good intelligence… so provided you know who will attack you, take them out before they hurt you… we have always followed that mantra, where you arrest and take them to court and then where necessary people go to prison,” he said.
He also emphasised on the need for good facilities and training for the security agencies.
Though the United Kingdom has faced increased terror attacks, the security response has always been remarkable as observed by panelists.
Like on June 4, UK police responded to a terror attack that saw seven people killed and 40 others injured.
Within a few minutes, all the 3 assailants had been killed.
