Orientation For The Police
By
I watched the television news report of the top echelon officer of the Nigeria Police, who addressed policemen and officers in the Lagos metropolis, the city which witnessed rapid-repeated murder of young citizens in the past few days. The lecturer-officer very correctly "reminded" (hopefully) the police audience that it was better for twenty criminals to escape the law than for one innocent citizen to be punished. He went further to remind the police officers that the men of the police are trained to shoot to maim their human objects but not to kill and proceeded to teach them how to shoot to maim citizens.
Using arms and live ammunition on unarmed citizens, with the frequently occurring tragedies, as a method of keeping citizens in line with the law needs to be properly looked at again by the government. The use of live ammunition by the police is not and cannot be the dominant method of dealing with minor civil lawlessness. From all indications it has become the only method of policing to which Nigerians are exposed. The use of life ammunition against unarmed civil population cannot be acceptable in any civilised society. Granted, Nigerians are not civilised, yet it is not acceptable that our citizens are taken for bush animals roaming our streets by Nigerians who are organised and paid to protect them. Even an invading foreign army, by all standards of military ethics, will not shoot live ammunition at civilian Nigerians who are not carrying arms in a war situation.
We need to re-orientate the psyche of men of the Nigeria Police to put an all-time stop to these tragic occurrences that decimate families and throw loved ones into eternal agony and psychological torture. Many young lives are being cruelly wasted. Indeed, many young citizens, when sent on errands with their parents' automobiles, want to hold in their pockets bribe currency with which to appease the stop and check policemen who litter our streets. They tell us, their parents, that the stop and check policemen on the streets target their age group for extortionist objectives and unwarranted violence. They are some of these hunting encounters that result in irreparable tragedies among the youths.
The use of lethal methods in checking minor infractions is totally barbaric, animalistic and incoherent with human policing. Live ammunition in the context of limited force are applicable in uncontrollable riot situations where the rioting elements are themselves armed and engaged in indiscriminate shooting. In the Nigerian context, the only other situation to utilise live ammunition is in encounters with armed (yes, armed) robbers, indeed not petty thieves and pickpockets. There is no place anywhere to litter the streets with arms and ammunition among the civil population. At a stage, the Nigerian government, one of the military dictatorships, bought and equipped the Nigerian police with armoured tanks!
And on a number of occasions, those tanks were deployed against the people. Indeed, university gates were converted into alert and start-off points for the tanks to be deployed in action against Nigerian youths, student in those institutions. Some armoured tanks were even deployed on the Third Mainland Bridge! Certainly, that cannot be right nor can it be acceptable in any civilised society.
The police is not expected to be an anti-people organisation that interacts routinely by violence with the people. The psychology needs a total change. The appropriate arm of government should consider the following proposals, among many others, which can easily be sourced from experts in criminology. Firstly, the men of the Nigerian Police should be retained to return to standard policing methods. These include:
* Local foot patrolling of neighbourhoods by policemen armed with
the batons, the real stock-in-trade of the policeman (olopa);
* A thorough knowledge of the localities and apartments which are
hideouts of criminals. Such hideouts are intelligently targeted to
extract the criminals, not decimate them in locus, by the police;
* Discreet segmental patrolling in vehicles by policemen still armed with their batons.
Secondly, the police squads that are specially armed to respond to proven localities of uncontrolled violence, or armed criminals' hideous are clustered in official locations from where, with efficient communication, they efficiently react to situations of violence. All those lethal arms and ammunition that litter our streets in the hands of policemen should promptly be withdrawn. Trained policemen should be able to maintain law and order among unarmed civil population without the use of lethal ammunition. We do not have to arm patrolling policemen with lethal ammunition.
Thirdly, the extortion-prone method of stop and check citizens on the wayside, in public commercial vehicles, which as permeated to lanes and residential backyards over the decades of military rule should be promptly discarded. Over the years, this self-seeking approach to policing the civil population has not yielded any good results. Indeed, the crime rate has continued to climb very rapidly to the heavens. The reason is simple. The root of increasing crime in the Nigerian society is not and has never been due to under-policing. I agree that we need to expand the size of the Nigeria Police, but not necessarily to effectively combat crime. The cause of increasing crime occurrence in Nigeria is prolonged and continuing bad governance. The demographic profile from the 1991 census shows that the youth constitute 36 percent of the national population. These are citizens aged between 15 and 45 years. As at December 2000, there were 35 million unemployed Nigerians, 6.5 million of whom were young graduates. And we know that these disheartening figures keep rising. They would all be angels if some of these jobless youthful millions did not take to crime, particularly in a society where many intellectually lowly compatriots cannot justify the affluence that they wave at the hungry and hopeless faces of Nigerians. The day this country installs a purposeful government that squarely addresses the problems of the 40 million young people of Nigeria, the graph of crime occurrence will make a loop and take a perpetually downward trend. Increasing crime rate is a pathological complication of bad government. Indiscriminate use of arms and ammunition cannot cure it. Only good government that purposefully removes unemployment will decrease drastically crime frequency in the society.
Fourthly, we need to redesign the Nigeria Police training curriculum. The psychology of the colonial anti-people police whereby the people were seen in the minds of policemen as unruly gangs of anti-government rioters, should by now, be confined to the dustbin of colonial history, which by our historical claim, ended some forty-two years ago. We remember that our military politicians re-colonised our people until very recently. The present government has a duty to discard the colonial police mentality into the graveyard of the past. The new Nigerian policeman must, during training, be thoroughly immersed in psychology to enable him respond, even on his own, intelligently to unexpected human situations. His psyche must be such that he must continuously remember that correction of the lawless citizen back into the line of order in society is his objective and not thoughtless decimation of the lawless citizen.
Fifthly, the police training colleges should routinely accept only recruits and trainees that have been psychologically screened. If does no good to our society for those who are required to prevent and control crime to be no different from the criminals. A structured psychological assessment must aim at recruiting emotionally stable and psychologically balanced personnel to become officers and men of the Nigeria Police. Of course, even after enlistment and training, annual psychological re-assessment should be an important part of routine police personnel management. Those who have acquired emotional instability or psychological disruption should be routinely weeded out of the police.
Our lethal weapons and ammunition are never meant to be turned on our unarmed citizens. Such agencies of decimation and death are meant for invaders. Even then, the officer said it all: the police are not trained to kill. But they are killing, killing our young men and women. And we must stop them.
Nov 2002