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The Nigeria Police Force should no longer recruit anyone without a first degree. Our expectations of the Police, the kind of responsibilities we entrust on them demand a certain level of education and character that must be above the ordinary. This would automatically elevate the status of the force and change the way the force thinks about itself, especially how low it can debase itself.
A qualitative rise in esteem by its members as well as the public would almost overnight transform the image of the force boosting its self-confidence. Members without a tertiary education should be taken through a training period, depending on where their formal education stopped, of education, intensive training and workshops, seminars in specialised occupations ranging from crime detection to maintenance, through ICT and logistics designed to bring them up to speed as graduates. They must be equipped with enough knowledge and information to police a 21st century Nigeria.
Their training and orientation should be such that when they are done, any police man at a crime scene should know enough of the rules of evidence and procedure to be able to address the Press and take questions and not wait for a Police PRO. They should know enough ‘law’ to draft charges, evaluate evidence and speak on them. They should be able to take cases to court on their own and know how to present them to a judge with the aim of obtaining a conviction and know chapter and verse the fundamental human rights of Nigerians and how to protect them and why they must always be protected.
No Nigerian Police officer ought to go on duty without a body camera. A police man without a body camera must be assumed to be off duty. The camera should act as both a time-keeper as well as a record keeper of activities to protect the officer as well as the public. Closed circuit television should cover every police division and all its surroundings just as every public building in Nigeria ought to be covered by closely monitored CCTV.
Every state government should cover every high risk neighbourhood with CCTV, likewise shopping malls, market places, motor vehicle and train stations to say nothing of our airports. It is not enough to install these CCTVs; they must be monitored regularly so as to gain their benefits.
The greatest favour the Federal Government can do to the Police and to Nigerians is to order the closure of all police cells in all police stations in the country without exception.
This is to shield the police by removing its most known sources of temptation to corruption and depravity. A corrupt Police force may enrich individual officers, as it does now, but it brings down the entire force in the estimation of right thinking members of the society. The Police jail cell must be remodelled and converted to furnished offices for police men and women, some of whom hardly gets a place to sit down and do their work in their stations.
The police cell infinitely complicates police work. Every divisional police officer is, in effect, saddled with the job of a jail supervisor and a crime detective. No one can do both. When they try, both are done badly. The Police should concentrate on Police work and take detainees to the state correctional centre, the proper place where persons should be held if they must be detained.
Now it is not merely that all the atrocities, all the tortures, all the unspeakable cruelties are perpetrated in police cells; it is that the police officers see the cells as their ATMs, source of perpetual corruption, moral decadence and a source of their arrogance of power. If a police man or woman feels strongly that a suspect must be detained, he should take the accused person to the nearest prison, not just lock him up next door to his or her office where the ostensibly innocent suspect is extorted, blackmailed, threatened and tortured. It should never be an excuse that the Ikoyi and Kirikiri Prisons are far away from Agege, Ipaja or Abule-Egba (in the case of Lagos State).
If need be the state government should build an extra correction centre to shorten distances. Perhaps the effort to take the suspect to prison might help reduce the number of Nigerians detained on flimsy excuses, and which probably would have saved the lives of scores of young people wasted in the jail cells of the Special Armed Robbery Squads. The National Assembly should enact laws making it illegal for a Nigerian to be held in any cell in any place in Nigeria other than in correctional centres.
Taking the accused straight to jail does not only remove the temptation to corruption of the police cell, it provides a second layer of protection for both the police man and the accused. Those taken into county jails in the US, for instance, are usually taken to the “commissioners” who act like resident magistrates. Experienced lawyers, they are the first to evaluate the legality of arrests. They are the first line of defence against over-zealous policing. They review the police record and ask routine questions, to establish if indeed there is a case.
They know the police man could be wrong or malicious. And if they think there is a case, they ask the next question: could the accused be released on bail on self-recognition? Is he a first offender? Is he a responsible citizen, does he have a family? Is he a flight risk? Or a repeat offender? If not, he or she must be taken to court the next day to fight for his bail.
With those routine, innocuous, questions the commissioners ensure that the path to justice is straightened out. That way they try to make sure the accused is not victimised by the rough edges of the judicial process. Our system, it appears, has no equivalent of the American commissioner, to review police arrests and detentions. It is incomprehensible that such logical system is not part of our judicial process.
It would have reduced to the barest minimum the number of persons awaiting trial in our correctional institutions I know our chief judges are expected to go round monthly to review the cases but nothing beats helping the accused on day one.
