U.S. law enforcement agents are working behind the scenes in several countries to install local police units in locations where departments are believed to be too full of corruption to uphold the law.
According to the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, members of 105 police units worldwide have been vetted to work along with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The units' members are handpicked by American Embassy personnel, then screened and assigned to missions that often pair with U.S. interests.
The State Department, however, says it is not able to provide an exact count of how many U.S.-aligned units there are altogether and how many officers they employ, as some agencies do their vetting. Also, there is no central office that tracks all the units' activities or how much local governments spend on them.
The State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security says it has agreements for governments for 16 vetted units in countries like Peru and the Philippines.
The Fish and Wildlife Service funds police agencies in Uganda and Nigeria, and in Kenya, vetted detectives from the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations are in units under the FBI, Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Fish and Wildlife Service.
The police units in Kenya are pursuing crimes such as heroin smuggling, passport and visa smuggling, and human trafficking, as well as criminal abuse of American citizens.
American agents who are stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, don't have arrest powers, but their local partners can make arrests.
The units ultimately answer to Mohamed Amin, Kenya's director of criminal investigations, according to the nation's government, but, "we, for the most part, have operational control," said Supervisory Special Agent Ryan Williams of the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
Williams has directed a five-person Kenyan police unit out of the Nairobi embassy.
Some Kenyans are not happy with the notion that foreigners have so much power in their country's law enforcement, including Murigi Kamande, an attorney for suspects who were arrested for their role in trafficking rare pangolins.
"They don't have autonomy," he said of the vetted officers. "They basically work at the behest of a foreign nation. It's not right."
The strategy was honed by the DEA in the 1980s during the cocaine wars in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, when resident American narcotics agents became frustrated by the hold drug cartels had over local police.
The DEA identified police officers they believed they could trust, according to research that was conducted by then-Princeton University professor Ethan Nadelmann.
Nadelmann discovered that the DEA was able to keep its vetted units clean of corruption through the use of pressure from the U.S. government.
The units have proven effective. In May, a vetted unit in Guyana tracked down and arrested a man wanted in the United States for the sexual assault of a child, and in another case, a unit in Colombia brought down a massive, seven-city human-smuggling operation that had been charging migrants $4,000 to $5,000 each for to provide them with fake documents so they could obtain U.S. visas.
According to a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Nairobi, the vetted officers "tend to perform significantly better" than unvetted police and are able to make more arrests and have higher rates of prosecutions and convictions as a result.
Meanwhile, the Kenyan officers who get positions in vetted units often get twice their usual pay, along with upgraded training and the prestige of being hired to work in elite squads.
In some instances, the vetted detectives turn out to be corrupt, but they are quickly identified and removed, usually through repeated lie detector tests, the Nairobi spokesman said.