The pattern is consistent enough to be structural. A death in custody is reported. An investigation is announced. A senior official expresses concern. A transfer is issued. The file is closed. The next death occurs. This sequence, documented by human rights organisations across dozens of countries and hundreds of incidents, is not the product of individual moral failure by specific officers. It is the output of an institutional architecture that was designed, in most cases during the colonial period, to control populations rather than to serve them, and that has been maintained, across independence and across generations of post-colonial governance, because it continues to serve the interests of the political class that inherited it. The brutality cycle is not a series of accidents. It is a system.

Across the globe, policing systems rooted in colonial violence have proven stubbornly resistant to reform. From Nigeria's SARS unit to South Africa's militarised police force, efforts to build democratic, accountable policing have foundered on the deep structural rot at the heart of these institutions. The colonial police force in most of what is now the Global South was not designed to protect the population it policed. It was designed to protect colonial property, suppress political dissent, extract labour compliance, and maintain the social order on which the colonial economy depended. The officers at the bottom of that hierarchy were drawn from the local population and trained to exercise violence against it on behalf of the colonial authority above them. The legal framework that governed their conduct prioritised the protection of the state over the rights of the individual. The accountability mechanism, such as it was, ran upward through the colonial hierarchy rather than outward toward the population affected.

Independence transferred the flags and the flags only. The police structures, the training manuals, the detention architecture, the legal frameworks governing arrest and custody, and the institutional culture of impunity that the colonial system had cultivated were inherited largely intact by the post-colonial states that replaced them. The officers changed. The system did not. And the system, optimised over decades for population control rather than public service, continued to produce the outcomes it was designed to produce: compliance through fear, silence through impunity, and the protection of state interests over individual rights.

The Philippines drug war is the most extensively documented case of state-directed mass police killing in the contemporary Global South. Since taking office on 30 June 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte carried out a war on drugs that led to the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos, mostly urban poor. At least 2,555 of the killings were attributed to the Philippine National Police. The government's own figures acknowledged 6,252 deaths in anti-drug police operations between 2016 and 2022. Human rights organisations, using independent monitoring, estimated the actual total at significantly higher, with some placing it above 27,000 when vigilante killings encouraged by political rhetoric are included.

The current Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., has never repudiated the war on drugs as a government policy and has yet to rescind the orders and other policy statements issued by Duterte. There have been 1,273 killings in the anti-drug campaign since Marcos became president in June 2022, according to independent monitoring by the Dahas Project. The International Criminal Court authorised an investigation into the killings in January 2023. Not a single police officer was prosecuted or dismissed from duty in relation to killings during police drug operations. The impunity was not incidental to the campaign. It was the precondition for its operation.

Nigeria's Special Anti-Robbery Squad was established in 1984 as a plainclothes unit tasked with combating armed robbery. By the time the EndSARS protests of October 2020 brought its conduct to international attention, it had evolved into what human rights organisations documented as a criminal enterprise operating within the police force: extorting money from young Nigerians on the basis of their appearance, torturing suspects in unofficial detention, and killing those who could not pay or who knew too much. The Mass Atrocities Casualties report published by Global Rights recorded 848 extrajudicial executions in Nigeria between 2020 and June 2023, with 127 cases in the first half of 2023 alone.

The Nigerian government disbanded SARS in October 2020 following the protests. It replaced it with the Special Weapons and Tactics Team, known as SWAT. The renaming changed nothing of structural consequence. The officers remained. The training framework remained. The accountability absence remained. The impunity culture remained. A unit that operated through extortion and violence was disbanded and reconstituted under a different acronym without any of the structural conditions that had produced its conduct being addressed. This is the transfer solution applied at institutional rather than individual scale: the name changes, the system does not.

The incident that brought global attention back to Kenya happened on 8 June 2025. Albert Ojwang, a 31-year-old teacher and blogger, died in police custody under troubling circumstances. He had been arrested in Homa Bay for allegedly defaming a senior police officer on social media. He was moved to Nairobi and died at the Central Police Station less than twelve hours after his arrest. Authorities claimed he had injured himself by hitting a wall. An independent autopsy showed signs of brutal torture including head trauma, neck compression, and other severe injuries.

The 2025 Kenyan protests, which ran from June to July, resulted in 65 deaths, more than 553 injuries, and over 1,500 arrests. The interior minister characterised the protests as raw and unprecedented terror and the protesters as marauding gangs, while reporting by The Guardian suggested that Kenyan police had made arrests at random, including of people fully uninvolved with the protests. Albert Ojwang was arrested for a social media post. He was dead within twelve hours. No officer was convicted. The protests his death helped ignite were met with the same police violence that had killed him.

The Mathare Social Justice Centre, which has documented over 800 killings by police in Kenya from 2013 to 2016, identifies the pattern precisely: first arbitrary arrest, followed by extortion, enforced disappearance, and finally death. The police force is deployed most intensively in poor urban informal settlements not to offer protection but to pacify and repress residents into submission. The colonial template, applied in Nairobi's informal settlements in 2025, is indistinguishable from the colonial template applied in those same communities a century earlier.

Mauritius is a different scale from the Philippines, Nigeria or Kenya. It is a small island of 1.3 million people with a police force that is not, by regional standards, among the most violent. But the zero is the same zero. Not one police officer has been convicted of brutality since independence in 1968. Not because brutality has never occurred — it has been documented in the Mauritian press across multiple incidents and multiple decades — but because the institutional conditions that would produce a conviction have never been assembled by any government of any political colour across 58 years of independence.

The Meridian documented, in its Unprotected MP article earlier in this edition, the conditions in which Mauritian officers operate: a constable starting salary of Rs 18,650 per month, representing Rs 2,150 above the national minimum wage; no mandatory psychological support programme; no formal trauma debriefing after violent incidents; promotion structures governed more by political proximity than professional performance; and an accountability mechanism that responds to documented misconduct with transfers rather than prosecutions. The officer who is verbally abusive in a custody suite is transferred. The officer who crosses a physical line is transferred. The line itself is never examined. The conditions that produced the conduct are never addressed. The cycle continues.

The reforms that would break the brutality cycle are consistently identified by the same bodies that document its consequences: the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and regional human rights bodies across Africa and Asia. They are not exotic or unaffordable. They are consistently the same set of structural interventions: independent oversight bodies with genuine investigative powers and no institutional connection to the forces they oversee; mandatory psychological support and trauma processing for officers in operational roles; competitive salaries that reduce the financial pressure that makes informal income attractive; prosecution of documented misconduct rather than transfer; and training frameworks redesigned around community safety rather than population control.

None of these reforms has been systematically implemented across the Global South because none of them is in the short-term political interest of the governments that would need to implement them. An independent oversight body with real powers threatens political control of the police. Competitive salaries require budget allocations that compete with other political priorities. Prosecution of officers who cross lines means prosecuting people whose willingness to cross lines has been politically useful. The brutality cycle persists not because its causes are unknown or its remedies unidentified. It persists because the political economy of policing in the Global South makes reform structurally inconvenient for those with the power to undertake it.