Police blame AI, recycled clips over surge on missing children
Police blame AI, recycled clips over surge on missing children
The National Police Service (NPS) has dismissed claims of a surge in child disappearance cases in Kenya.
In an interview on Tuesday, May 26, NPS Spokesperson Michael Muchiri attributed growing public panic to increased awareness and rapid spread of information online.
“We don’t have a surge; it is only that we have a public that is more conscious, more aware, and then we have the spread of information, which is faster,” he said.
Muchiri warned about the role of artificial intelligence and old clips being reshared online, saying this had contributed significantly to public anxiety.
“We have the intrusion of AI and fakes. Some of the clips we have seen in recent times, you find that this is something that is recycled; it has been seen at some other point,” he added.
Muchiri discouraged the trend, saying misleading online narratives risk creating unnecessary fear among Kenyans by giving the impression that the country is facing a crisis involving missing children.
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“It would place the country at a point where we suddenly start realizing or thinking that there is a surge, that we have an emergency in these cases, that is not the case at all. The best approach when you are talking about these things is to have the calmness and the facts before us,” he further said.
Elsewhere, Muchiri provided statistics on reported missing children cases, noting that the numbers have actually declined compared to previous years.
“Official police records this year talk about 139 cases. In 2025, we had 754 cases that were officially reported. In 2024, we had 1276 cases that were reported,” he noted.
Muchiri revealed that some of the cases reported this year are either before the courts or still under active investigation by detectives.
“For this year, we have 41 cases that are pending under the jurisdiction of the court. We have 52 cases that are under investigation by the police department,” he concluded.
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