A Kook at the Nigerian Police -By Segun Ogunlade

For a fact, many officers of the Nigerian Police Force have the tendency to abuse their power like everybody else in the position of power in Nigeria who often believes he is better than everyone else. Once they are decked in their black over black or blue over black uniform, they are not the same person they were the moment before they wore the uniform. But the fact remains that from Africa to Europe through America, Asia and everywhere else inhabited by humans, police brutality is a recurring phenomenon. We hear the news every time of how police officers kill unarmed citizens and watch as they go unpunished by a system that ensures that justice is not served. The recent killing of George by a police officer in the state of Minnesota in the U.S. is one out of many cases of police brutality and rather cold disposition towards human live. And when takes into cognizance the fact that a teenage girl by the name Tina was killed by a police officer in Lagos, then the case is made more glaring.

The fact that there is a level of unprofessionalism in the Nigerian Police Force is visible to the blind and is so loud that even the deaf could hear it. One of the many reasons men of the Nigerian Police Force are loathed is their propensity to extort anybody suspected of committing any crime and use every situation to make money off the people involved. Even when they know the person under arrest is innocent, they still find a way to get something out of his or her pocket. On the highway, they are always around to collect money from the drivers when the latter had done nothing wrong. The drivers have little or no choice against their unlawful extortion because of the fact that many Nigerian police officers are always trigger-happy. Extortion of the masses by men of the Nigerian Police Force is one of the many ways that Nigerians are extorted.

The extortion by the police officers has continued during the Covid-19 lockdown. Although President Muhammadu Buhari declared ban on inter-state transportation, it has not stopped. Police officers have aided it by allowing people travel from one to the other by collecting money to look the other way. This is not surprising at all since many of them are notorious for turning situations such as this into a money-making venture, thereby aiding the disobedience of federal directives and the breakdown of law and order.

What is worse is the way they treat crime suspects. The major way they get information out is often through torture and not through careful investigation by analysing evidences from the crime scene. Whereas police officers in the western world familiarise themselves with the criminal suspect and engage in dialogue so as to get every useful information out of their mouth, men of the Nigerian Police Force often resort to physical torture and brutality. They beat the suspects to the extent that some of them die in detention without ever been tried in a competent court of law. Proper investigation has been substituted with torture.

Torture is dehumanizing on whom it is inflicted. There is a level of pain the human body could endure before succumbing. Nonetheless, many people suspected of committing crimes are brutalized by mishandling by the police and are therefore traumatized. The police officers often make themselves judge, punish people as if they were criminal and they go away with the dehumanising act. Men of the Nigerian Police Force are not doing their duties according to international best practice. And this sometimes obstructs justice.

That calls to question the type of training they receive. They are trained to obtain information by every means possible even of it means violating the human rights of the person from the information is sought. Many of them lack emotional intelligence and could not hold a conversation with any suspected criminal without resorting to the use of force. Like every uniformed men in the country from the soldiers to men and women of the Federal Road Safety Corps through to men and women of the Nigerian Air Force and others like them, it is as if the uniform makes them a mini superhuman and they could do anything they want to do. They could force anybody to vomit information that they need and could turn anyone into a money making machine for a chance to get money to cover up an unlawful act.

But when takes a cursory look away from the many shortcomings of these police officers, one could see many of them as are as frustrated as everyone in the country. In a country where political officers did so little but count their remuneration in millions of naira, people that work under the sun day and night are expected to be disappointed and frustrated. Outside the political class, many people under the government payroll are not paid the amount of naira they deserve for their service to the nation. As they say on the street, their take home pay can’t take them past the street where it was earned.

This could account for why many of the police officers are deep necked in various subtle acts of corruption to augment their pay so it could take them home. Being paid too little for one’s service isn’t enough reason to compromise one’s integrity and aid the act of disobedience for government directives. However, many of them are like the everyday adults in Nigeria that are their own government. They make life easy for themselves and provide their own social amenities because the people charged with doing so have failed woefully and had pocketed the money instead. They are Nigerians like us and they also faced the hardship that will face because they live in the same society as us and suffer from poor political administration in the country.
Moreover, the police force is largely under-equipped. They don’t have the modern technological equipment that could aid their investigation. So far, many of their investigations are not based on forensics but by arresting suspected perpetrators of a crime, torture them and see if they would vomit information. They don’t have the equipment to analyse fingerprints or DNA from a crime scene and many times they contaminated the crime scene themselves because of lack of forensic investigation. Even their operational cars are not enough. Many times, they transport themselves in a van and sometimes needed to transport themselves in the car of the arrested person(s). The vans are not all in good shape but they are still used nonetheless.

As Mario Alvarado of Amnesty International said, “The use of unnecessary, excessive, and unlawful force by the police is deeply disturbing and shall not be tolerated – we must stand against it immediately whenever we see it. No one should fear for their lives when interacting with officials sworn to protect us.” For the police to be our friends as they always say, we don’t need to fear them because of the uncertainty that comes with their behaviour when they are in uniform. Truth be told, our police officers are trying despite working under an unfavourable circumstances brought about by the environment in which their duty is being performed. Thus, it is the duty of the government to take the issue of police welfare as an important issue, equip them with state of the art weapons and equipment and train them how to conduct investigation under pressure without resorting to inhuman torture of suspects. When people work under the normal circumstance, they tend to perform better.

Written by Segun Ogunlade