When Gunmen No Longer Fear The State: Kenya’s Security Chiefs Must Restore Order or Resign
There was a time when criminals feared daylight. They waited for darkness, avoided crowded places and understood that a public attack increased the chances of identification, pursuit and arrest. Kenya is now witnessing something far more disturbing: gunmen entering restaurants, cafés, salons and shops as though the country has no patrols, no intelligence network and no functioning system of deterrence. They arrive quickly, intimidate ordinary people, seize phones, laptops, cash and other valuables, then disappear before effective intervention arrives.
The attacks are frequently captured on CCTV and replayed across the country. Kenyans watch frightened customers raise their hands, workers retreat behind counters and business owners surrender the tools of their livelihoods. The footage is consumed not merely as evidence of one robbery, but as a warning that the ordinary boundaries between safe public life and violent crime are being erased. The question travelling through homes, workplaces and social media is painfully simple: where are the police, and why do these offenders appear so confident?
That public anger must be grounded in facts. Kenya’s official statistics do not support the claim that every category of crime is rising without interruption. Data compiled by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the National Police Service shows that total reported crime rose from 93,411 cases in 2019 to a seven-year peak of 104,842 in 2023, before declining to 101,220 in 2024 and 96,038 in 2025. The fall is real, it is relevant, and it must be acknowledged. But it cannot be used as a political curtain behind which the security leadership hides from the current crisis of visible, organised and psychologically devastating robbery.
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Figure 1. Total reported crime rose to a peak in 2023 before declining in 2024 and 2025.
A national total answers only one part of the question. It counts offences recorded by police systems; it does not perfectly capture every offence experienced by citizens, every victim who decided reporting was pointless, or every business that absorbed a loss because the owner feared retaliation or had little confidence that stolen property would be recovered. Statistics are indispensable, but they are not identical to lived safety. A country can record fewer cases nationally while a concentrated sequence of armed robberies creates a powerful and legitimate sense that public spaces are becoming less secure.
Robbery data explains why complacency would be reckless. Reported robbery fell from 3,988 cases in 2023 to 3,642 in 2024 and 3,261 in 2025. That decline is welcome, but the 2025 figure was still roughly one-third above the 2,456 cases recorded in 2021. The country has therefore not returned to the lower early-decade range. The direction improved after 2023, but the burden remains elevated, and the recent public-place incidents have magnified the political and economic consequences of each attack.
Figure 2. Robbery declined after 2023 but remained above the levels recorded in 2019-2021.
The difference becomes even clearer when total crime and robbery are indexed to their 2019 levels. Robbery rose more sharply through 2023 and remained further above its starting point in 2025. This is precisely why broad government statements about declining crime can sound detached from what citizens see. The public is not imagining the difference between a statistical improvement and a fully restored sense of security.
