Too dangerous and too unsafe would be appropriate in describing the Nigerian streets, towns and cities. Ironically, a major source of this danger and lack of safety is the Nigerian Police. Poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly motivated and totally lacking in discipline, our police force has turned into a menace for the society. Many who had any illusions about the deplorable state of the Nigerian Police were to disabuse their minds after they viewed a documentary on the abysmal and subhuman conditions of a Nigerian Police College. And yet what they saw in that video was only a tiny bit of the huge decay that has since engulfed the Nigerian Police as an institution.
These massive rot and failings are shrouded in the overt and crude display of Nigerian policing. This display takes the form of the bizarre and meaningless names the various police units call themselves. Operation Rapid Response (ORR), Operation Fire for Fire (OFF), Special Armed Robbery Squad (SARS) and such other drama are the names they call themselves. You see them boldly and menacingly written on their vehicles. In gas stations, on the highway, in the market places, next to women selling fruits and vegetables, in the street corners and where else have you, you see the Nigerian policemen wielding their guns and throwing their weights around in the most crude and intimidation manner possible. But beyond these outward manifestation, you have mostly nothing more than uniformed men with little skills in policing work and with little ability to maintain law and order or keep the society safe.
Increasingly, these weaknesses reached a level where the police totally turned against the people they were meant to protect. The police brutalize the average person in the street. Women and children are routinely rounded up and beaten. Their cells are clustered with suspects, who are used for all kinds of racketeering for bribe. I will never forget the story a lady, a one-time detainee at the police cell in Akure, told me. The local police, acting on the instruction of the EFCC, had arrested her. They arrested and took her to the police station because they could not find her boyfriend, who was the person they were after for some cyber crimes. Immediately she arrived at the cell, the true character of typical policemen showed. One officer tried to fumble her breasts. She begged them not to. Another officer asked to pay two thousand naira so that she would not be fumbled. She did. Then they took out a police belt and gave her a few lashes for sample, and then told her that every arriving detainee would get beaten. The message was the same - the only way to avoid a thorough beating was for her to pay some money. She paid. They then showed her all the cells, each jammed with detainees in various state of degradation. They showed her also a cell that was not so jammed and where the cell-mates seemed less possessed than those in the overcrowded cells. They then asked her which of the cells she wanted to be put in. She, of course, chose the cell that looked less jammed. The officer then told her how much she had to pay if she did not want to be put in the cells that were overcrowded. And she paid.
A few minutes after she was placed in the cell, the police officers called her out. They gave her a piece of paper to make a statement and explain her role in the alleged offenses. When she finished writing her statement, the officers took it away from her and threatened to kill her if she did not write a different statement, which they dictated for her. The difference was that in the statement they dictated for her, she admitted that she committed all the crimes originally alleged against her boyfriend. The officers took the second statement from her also. A few hours after later, they called her back and told her the price of each of the two statements. For them not to submit the confessional statement, she had to pay ten thousand naira. If she paid that, they would destroy the incriminating statement and place her original statement in her file. Otherwise, they would destroy the original statement and place the incriminating one in her file. She paid. At no point in all this did it bother the officers that the case in question was actually an EFCC case and they were actually holding the lady till the following day when the EFCC operatives would come to take her to Abuja, and only then take her statement.
THE INVOLVEMENT OF THE POLICE IN CRIMES:
The worst aspect of the Nigerian police is not just the mere fact that most officer are mere brutes with not training and not real capabilities in modern law enforcement. Rather, the most dangerous aspect of the Nigerian police has to do with the rouge elements in the force, including some psychopaths, whose obsession is to kill people at random. Among these extremely violent and deadly elements in the force are those who actually spearhead armed robbery attacks and kidnappings. Members of these criminal elements are officers in the police who double as leaders of various criminal gangs. They provide operational instructions and logistical support for various gangs and protect them from the law. But whenever it suits them, they would easily kill a few members of their gangs either for insubordination or other acts of disloyalty. The method would be for the policeman in charge of the gang to set up any member of his gang that he wants to eliminate. That member would be arrested for armed robbery or kidnapping. But the plan will be to kill him before he could reveal information about the gang he belonged to and the people that led such gang. Hence the extra-judicial executions of suspects.
Whenever you hear that the police shut an armed robber or a kidnapper or that a kidnapper who was arrested by the police died in custody, it is likely to be a junior member of a gang that had to be killed to prevent the disclosure of the identity of the real boss, who is a police officer. After some research and investigation, the facts that are emerging are that the Nigerian police have a hand in at least 90% of the kidnappings in the Eastern part of Nigeria and in over 50% of armed robbery in the area. The police do not always kill suspects of armed robbery or kidnapping unless the suspect is an unwanted member of a gang led by the officers. As almost all the gangs for kidnapping in certain states in the Eastern part of Nigeria came to be owned or controlled by the officers of the police force, almost every person accused by the police of kidnapping will surely be killed by the police without trial.
The above findings and projections are totally logical and consistent with observable trends. Most of the suspects paraded by the police are young men who started off with minor brushes with the law, only to be recruited into the gangs by the police they encountered earlier in their crime careers. Otherwise, hardly do you hear of gang-leaders being arrested. Even when the police use the term ‘kingpin’ to describe a suspect, as was done by Mr. Bala Nasarawa on the October 23, 2012 YouTube video, such descriptions never match the facts on the ground. Otherwise, how come that with respect to kidnapping operations that involve several players at various levels, we only hear of the arrest of one or two people, who then get killed. What happened to their leaders? You would never hear of the arrest of the leaders because the leaders are the ones doing the arresting and organizing the parading of suspects.
More questions could be asked. For instance, how do the kidnappers get their constant supply of weapons, if not from sources that had legitimate access to weapons? How come that kidnapping continues to grow, even as the police seem to be arresting and killing more kidnappers? There is supposed to be an inverse relationship between the number of kidnappers killed and the number of kidnapping incidents. That is to say, the more kidnappers arrested and killed, the fewer kidnapping that would occur in the future. But in reality, what is going on in, say, Anambra State is that the more kidnappers arrested or killed, the more kidnappings that occur after. It is either that those arrested and killed as kidnappers were not the real kidnappers or that those arrested and killed are insignificant players in the crime of kidnapping. Otherwise, if the police have been arresting the leaders of the gangs, as they should once they were able to arrest their members, there ought to have been a decline in the number of kidnapping incidents.
From everything taught by the science of criminology, there are some operational peculiarities to kidnapping for ransom that would have prevented it from becoming a rampant crime. First, it requires coordinated gang activities to take the victim, secure the victim, keep him safe, but away from rescue, negotiate ransom, take delivery of ransom and return the victim unharmed and without any trace left behind. This crime involves a whole production team. And it has several risks for detection at any of the various operational stages. The arrest of any of the members of a kidnap gang is supposed to lead to the arrest of at least five other gang members. How come that our policemen who are aware of these crimes, and who ought to monitor the ransom negotiations, their delivery and pick-up, have not been able to crack any major armed robbery gang. All we have seen is the occasional parading of some possible low profile suspects too few to constitute a gang. Even in the absence of specific eyewitness testimonies, which are now available, it is logical to conclude that the police officers are heavily involved in the commission of the crime of kidnapping, particularly in the Eastern states.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Killing of suspects before trial is not only the wrong way to fight crimes in the society, but it is also a violation of fundamental rights of the suspects. The right to life and right to fair hearing are the most impacted of the rights. The dummy that has been sold to the people, particularly the people from the Eastern part of Nigeria, is the idea that to kill suspects before trial would help reduce crime. The truth is the opposite. The main person interested in killing suspects without trial is the person who is interested in covering up the identify of the leaders of the criminal gangs.
From the human rights abuse prevention point of view, which is my principal premise, we can achieve some success in both ends by taking just the following measures:
(1) Each police station should keep a record of every person arrested or detained for more than fifteen minutes. The record would show the date of the arrest, the place and reasons for the arrest and the place where the person is being detained. The record will also show the date the person was taken to court or the date of his release from custody and the terms of his release.
(2) Each police station shall keep a record of every person who died while in the custody of the police or in a shoot out with the police, the date of death, the manner of death, the place the body is kept.
(3) Every week, such record would be sent one copy to the office of the Attorney-General, and another copy to the Human Rights Commission.
(4) Everybody arrested must be given opportunities to call his relatives or his lawyers to inform them of his arrest, the reasons for his arrest and the police station where he is detained.
(5) Any suspect wounded by the police in a shootout with the police or in any other setting must be taken by the police to a hospital where he would receive treatment and cannot be removed from such hospital until a physician certifies him well enough to leave the hospital.
The benefits of the above recommendations are significant. For one, Nigerians would no longer have to go from one police station to another to check whether their missing relatives were arrested by the police. There will just be a central location where anybody could call to confirm whether his relative was arrested by the police. Also, this will expose the true number of suspects and people killed by the police and dumped in the rivers.
We can further extend this requirement to other law enforcement agencies in Nigeria, such as SSS, EFCC, Immigration, NDLEA, etc. The Attorney-General of Nigeria and the Human Commission should have one central place they can look and know who was arrested, where, when and for what reasons. Also, anybody detained for up to fifteen minutes by any of these agencies would be disclosed even after he has been released. It shall be a serious crime for any law enforcement officer to fail to disclose this information and submit this report accordingly. If we had this in place, the SSS would not detain or intercept Emeka Ugwuonye ten times at the same airport under the same pretext. By the time they report the incident ten times, the world would see them as a joke of a security outfit, which they really are.
This alone will reduce the human rights crisis in this country significantly. It would also reduce crime and protect the society. It would go a long way to elevate the rule of law and due process.
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