Capacity of the Police Officer to Gather Evidence in Criminal Investigation

In Kenya criminal investigation is experiencing emerging challenges which need to be urgently addressed in order to arrest these worrying trends. Failures to effectively gather evidence in the criminal investigation process can have serious consequences like unsolved crimes, unsuccessful prosecution, unpunished offenders and wrongful convictions.  The study sought to find out the capacity of the police officers to gather evidence in criminal investigations. The study adopted ex post facto research design. From the target population of 213 police officers the study used purposive and random sampling methods to select 82 respondents for this study. The senior police officers dealing with crime were selected purposively while junior police officers attached to crime sections were selected randomly. The study used questionnaires and interview schedules as primary data collection instruments. The senior police officers were interviewed while the junior police officers and criminal investigation officers filled self-administered questionnaires. Qualitative data was analysed using the thematic method, while quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics such as frequencies, modes, means, variances and standard deviations. The study findings established that police lacked adequate capacity to gather effective evidence in criminal investigation due to myriad of challenges delving the service. The study recommends urgent measures to be put in place to upgrade the capacity of the Kenya Police Service in order to improve on effective evidence gathering.