Partnering the Crime Victims Foundation of Nigeria (CRIVIFON), the Lagos State Police Command looks forward to reducing rights abuse and improving relations with the citizenry, writes Reporter, MARY OGEDENGBE.
The Nigerian Police Force (NPF), with about 400,000 officers and men (and planning to increase it to 600,000), is counted among the top 10 largest in the world and largest in Africa.
As the foremost law enforcement agency in the country, it is charged with the responsibility of protecting and safeguarding lives and property. But for many years, the reverse has been the case. Bribery, corruption, incompetence, extrajudicial killing, unruliness, abuse of power, just to mention a few, have continued to rock the NPF. This in turn resulted in the lack of confidence in the NPF and the use of self-help by citizens in dire need of justice.
Sometime in April 2014, a police officer was caught on camera assaulting a young lady by dipping her in muddy water and afterwards pointed his gun at her. On December 6, 2013, in Anambra State, a police officer killed a 28-year-old man by the name, Anayo Opara. The police officer allegedly lifted him and left him to land on his head at the police station. Also on April 15, 2014, Divisional Police Officer (DPO), Adekunle Awe, was accused of raping a female detainee. These and many other allegations have been levelled against the police.
It is for this reason and more that the Crime Victims Foundation (CRIVIFON) was established, TheNiche learnt.
CRIVIFON was established as non-governmental, non-political organisation with charitable status registered in Nigeria as a private company limited by guarantee and founded by Gloria Egbuji, a lawyer and social scientist who at that time was doing her Ph.d in Victimology at the University of Lagos.
Though initially charged with the responsibility of solely providing support to crime victims in Nigeria, the organisation, however, took a step further when it discovered via its first victimisation survey in 1998 that members of the public had a lot of resentment towards police officers and were unwilling to work with them. This further led to the realisation that even the NPF had a low understanding of human rights.
CRIVIFON, seeing this huge gap and poor relations between the public and the NPF, embarked on training police officers in Lagos State on human rights education programme to help bring on board a healthy police-citizen relationship and a trustworthy generation of police officers.
Egbuji, stated that, “our vision for the programme had been to develop and implement positive-oriented capacity building and human rights culture in the Nigeria police and to eradicate human rights abuse and corrupt practices among police officers and the public.
“The human rights project was approved and inaugurated by the then Inspector General of Police (IGP) in 2006 in Lagos with the launch of Human Rights Desk and Human Rights Resource Centre. This was as a result of our foundation’s fervent desire to see people-friendly police officers that will work in accordance with the law and respect for people’s rights.”
At the 20th graduation ceremony of the police human right officers, 218 officers from the ranks of CSP (Chief Superintendent of Police) to constable successfully completed the course for three months and graduated. They were trained meritoriously on Chapter 4 of the Nigerian constitution, Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, Interpersonal Skills and Humanitarian Laws, Police Powers, amongst others.
Egbuji, the lawyer said that, “virtually all the divisions in Lagos are manned by trained human rights desk officers, and they have been able to bring a lot of improvement, thus bringing a better climate for crime control and people-friendly policing in Lagos State.”
At the graduation ceremony, Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Kayode Aderanti, charged the graduating officers to put into practice what was learnt in the course. He said also that the NPF is not resting on its oars, but is doing everything possible to combat crime in Lagos.
“More efforts are being put in place to increase community police, partnership with individuals and organisations for improved security. We also are working on improving the image of the police, reduction of human rights abuse and respect for rights,” Aderanti stated.
So far, CRIVIFON has trained over 14,000 officers in Lagos, Railway, Airport and Zone 2 commands on human rights abuse, thereby reducing drastically the level of human rights mistreatment in the country.
“The programme has made the abuse of human rights minimal in Lagos State. Lagos police formation now has much higher standard in human rights observance than other states due to the benefit of the training and awareness created by the programme. But there is still room for improvement,” Egbuji says.
Present also at the occasion were officers from the United Nations Information Centre in Lagos led by the UN Senior Information Officer, Envera Selimovic; Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Kenneth Nwosu; and a number of others.