Copaganda, Cop City, Omobolanle Raheem, And Trever Nichols -By Chibuike Obi

The Police in Nigeria And The US; A Brief Look.

Most of us are inundated from early childhood with cop TV shows, cop novels, and cop movies glorifying the noble work the police do to ensure citizens are safe and alive. This is true whether one grew up in the US or Nigeria because Nigerian popular culture was and is still derivative of US popular culture. James Hadley Chase novels, Beverly Hills Cop, Law and Order, NCIS, etc formed the staple of popular young adult visual and literary entertainment in both countries from the early 80s to date. On growing older especially if one is male, some of the copaganda begins to wear off. The typical adult male begins to encounter police bullying and harassment at traffic stops. Unlawful, unprovoked, and unjustified raids by police at relaxation centers force the post-adolescent male( males are almost always the victims) to confront the reality of a police force that is brutal and extortionate in its actions.

The recent murder of Tyre Nichols is the latest episode in the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, and maddening saga of police brutality and murder in the US. This recent killing of Tyre Nichols, a black man, by black police officers has presented an often overlooked dimension in the understanding of police murders of black people. In the US, the racial composition of the police force reflects the demographic structure of American society therefore most police murders of black people are by white police officers. So this case highlights the often overlooked issue of vicious black police officers in the mainstream discourse about police brutality in the US. A James Baldwin quote that has been trending in black progressive Twitter recently, reaffirmed the long-standing knowledge in black communities about the tendency of black police officers to be more violent than their white colleagues in their treatment of their black brothers and sisters to gain recognition and acceptance within the police system.

The phenomenon of black police violence against black people in the US forms a natural segue into police brutality in Nigeria. In Nigeria, everybody is black (even though a substantial proportion of people in Northern Nigeria want to be more Arabic and Islamic than the Arabs and a lesser proportion in Southern Nigeria want to be more White and Christian than the Whites) but this doesn’t stop the Nigerian Police force from treating Nigerians with probably more brutality and viciousness that the mostly white American police treat blacks in the US. That is why it is so tempting for class reductionists in Nigeria and the US to treat police brutality as a class issue and ignore or downplay the interplay between class, race, ethnicity, and even religion in the problem of widespread police violence on its citizens in both countries. The problem of significant police violence against citizens is of course not limited to the US and Nigeria. But a predictor for systemic police violence and corruption in a country is the level of poverty and corruption in the country, the level of inequality within the country, the level of ethnic and racial differentiation within the country, the history of the interethnic and inter-racial relations and conflicts in the country and the extent to which conflicts were resolved. In Nigeria and the US, all these factors are relevant to an understanding of recurrent and endemic police violence in both countries. In the US, after the George Floyd protests and in Nigeria after the End SARS protests, it is evident that there has been no diminution of police violence. The police in America somehow got more funded by the nicer-looking but more effectively destructive part of the corporate, oligarchic duopoly ruling the US that has only encouraged the police on their killing spree of citizens. More funding as a solution to police violence has become so normalized that Atlanta City and the Atlanta Police Foundation are proposing to build a cop city in Atlanta on a site notorious for past atrocities by the prison system. The Buhari regime in Nigeria simply continued with their usual practice of aiding and abetting massive police corruption and ignoring police abuses of citizens.

These reform efforts (token in the US and practically non-existent in Nigeria) merely increased police shootings and killings in both countries. The culture of impunity, recklessness, and blatant disregard for human life in police departments of both countries had briefly declined in the aftermath of widespread and violent anti-police riots in 2020 but almost immediately revived and gained a new lease of life. The revitalization of this abhorrent police culture has manifested in the same kind of police killings that caused the anti-police riots in 2020. The killing of Trevor Nichols, a black man, under camera surveillance by black police officers and the shooting of Omobolanle Raheem, a pregnant lawyer at a traffic stop in Lagos barely three years after the George Floyd protests in the US, and the EndSars protests in Nigeria, shows that the culture has not only gained a new lease of life but has become more pernicious and malevolent. It should now be clear that the usual reforms cannot solve the problem in both countries. It is also clear that more militant attempts at overhauling the police system will run into both State Forces’ inevitable brutal and disproportionate response of suppression. So it should be clear that a fundamental rethinking of not just both countries’ police systems but the nature of and function of the State in both countries is necessary. Police brutality, extortion, and corruption have been a recurring problem in Nigeria since before the county’s formal independence and systemic police brutality against blacks dating from the days of the slave patrol in the US suggest that the usual methods of reform and amelioration will not work. Because doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results leaves one to the openness of being called a…

Chibuike Obi, a freelance journalist based in Niger State, can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com or on Twitter @chibuikeobi19 or Facebook