AS crimes continue to surge and in the wake of various cases of extra-judicial killing by policemen, Dr. Ona Ekhomu, is expectedly disturbed. At a his office, in Lagos, he bared his mind on the state of the Police in this interview.
Excerpts…
Last year, President Muhammadu Buhari said 10,000 people will be recruited into the police force. In recent times, we have had several cases of extra-judicial killings by low rank policemen. What does this say about the police recruitment process?
It says that like all human beings, the police are fallible; they can make mistakes. It means that we don’t have a perfect system. It says that there are problems within the police agency, urgent problems, internal problems, what we call endogenous problems within the police agency, which need to be looked into. Recruitment is just the process of bringing in new service members into the organization! That has nothing to do with vetting, training, supervision and discipline, continuous training, psychological profiling, and behavioural analysis. There are other things that need to happen within the Police Agency for us to have a more perfect force. We are not serious about policing; we are not serious about security in this country. When I say ‘we’ I mean the government of the day. We are assuming that the government represents us. So, the government that should be taking care of us is not serious. Police service members are far fewer than they should be and police commanders are having a hard time providing men for show of force, deterring of crime, crime prevention patrols and other things. You must have people in uniform who are able bodied, able to carry themselves and move around so that when people see they say “Oh, that is a symbol of the law.” because the police agency remember is the most visible government agency. In fact, if you don’t have police in a place, you don’t have law and order.
What it says is that the Nigerian Government and its citizens are not serious because we are not holding the feet of people in government to the fire and asking them why we don’t have a competent police agency that can really do the things that need to be done. I am talking about a police agency that would not have a rogue cop that shot people and killed himself. Now, we don’t know why he did whatever he did. We presume him drunk. Who declared him drunk? I did not see any toxicology report that said he was drunk. But we have seen drunk policemen on the beat, officers under the influence of cannabis, and they are a risk to the society because when somebody comes up and he is not willing to part with Nairamicin, they are ready to shoot. However, all those things can be corrected.
Come to think of it, how many people do we really have in the police? We are talking of 330,000 officers, which right now is far below the 450,000 or 470,000 we have been aiming to reach for a long time. What I was made to understand by a commander recently is that since the last Obasanjo recruitment, they have not recruited. So all the wastages – officers who died, those that resigned, those sacked, those shot by armed robbers, officers that are very sick, those got admission to study on leave of absence, they are not being replaced. The same fewer diminishing manpower is being moved around, trying to do ‘the more you look, the less you see.’ In Lagos, you see our Rapid Response Squad patrol vehicles on the road, but nobody inside because there is no policeman to put there. The manpower stock isn’t there. You cannot have manpower stock until there is approval for recruitment for the agency and money to back the process up. At present, recruitment is done on ‘Man know man’ basis. A primary reason for that is because there are no jobs and people are desperate; so it is only the fittest that can survive but we have to look at people’s motivation. You must have a system which comprises of educated and able-bodied men who are willing to do the job. Find out why they want to join the police force so that we do not recruit armed robbers in the police agency. We have psychological tools, for instance, the MM3 Test and so many things you can use to find out what is inside a guy’s mind. We have tools in my company here that we can use to find out who is a potential kidnapper.
What kind of training are the officers receiving?
Are they still using the old colonial calendar by R.V Jones? That is the man who used to train them back then and I bet you, that is what they are still using. When the officers are there, they give them shorts, they dehumanize them instead of treating them as responsible adults, and they first dehumanize them because they want to task them. I believe you remember Channels TV documentary on Ikeja Police College and all other police schools across Nigeria. It’s a stink. It’s that bad. How do you expect a good product to come out of a place where the physical facilities are not there? Where three people are using one naira to feed in a day? Is that possible? How far can you stretch one naira? These are the things that contribute to the kind of policing we get.
What dangers are posed to society by the recruitment of arms-bearing policemen?
The arm is a tool of the trade. It is part of the dress uniform for a policeman because a policeman in the old days used to carry a thick stick. Look at the officer who supposedly fired a warning shot in the air but he was executed by gun bearing people. Those were not policemen who shot him. Those were criminals, armed robbers or kidnappers. Maybe they recognized him as a SARS officer and decided to execute him. In other countries, the police will hunt them until they put them in their graves. In our country, we say maybe he looked for their trouble. The arm is the part of the tool kit and does not present any danger to the society. The arm is a necessity because you must have what is called deadly force. It is a necessity in carrying out policing duties. Where there is a problem is at the training segment. What kind of training do you give to people who are bearing arms? What sort of psychological evaluations are we giving to them? Like the man who was gunned down at Agege, you alone in a street level operation cannot cover everything. When you are alone, you are isolated because the police works on the principle of massing many officers that converge on one offender/perpetrator. If you have only one officer and one perpetrator, perpetrator might be strong enough to overcome the officer. And then it becomes the dead body of the officer that we will be carrying rather than that of the offender. The police officer must have a radio set, you must have your men who are backing you up and you cannot enter a high risk environment without adequate backup. In fact, the standard procedure is you must have two men minimum entering with you and you must have more back-up. If there is a projectile encounter, you the police are the good guy. You are supposed to prevail by all means. Assume that they are trained in the art of managing violence, you know when to use deadly force and when not to use it. A very dear friend of mine who we went to high school over 30 years ago was a top police officer. He was bursting armed robbers here and there. He trailed an armed robbery gang to where they were sharing money alone on a motorcycle and he was gunned down, lost his life needlessly. Why would he do that? He should have known that he needed back-up to take that kind of high risk, going to a band of thieves. Imagine one person alone, with one pistol. I think that is too risky no matter how gallant or brave you are. The only time a person should do that is if they attack you and you are alone then you defend yourself or give up. Policing is done on force orders such that it will save their lives and save the lives of the members of the public.
Following the Ketu, Lagos incident where a policeman killed three men and then shot himself, the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, said rank and file policemen will undergo psychiatric evaluation. Will such evaluation improve the conduct of policemen generally?
What the IGP said is music to my ears. It is very nice. It means we really do have an IGP for the first time in a long while who knows what policing is about, who understands the complex nature of this job. These people (policemen) deal with the worst people every day, people at the lowest points of their lives. They deal with human misery and extreme circumstances. When the heads have been cut off and the legs are flying, that is when they come on the scene and these things do violence to the human psychic. It rips it apart. They keep taking and taking it. After a while, you become immune to violence. You have to restore their humanity. That is why the IGP is saying you must do psychic evaluation to restore their humanity. You must get them to empathize, feel like human beings and feel sorry and feel bad. But how do you do that? How do you know who to restore and who needs to go to the hospital or who is okay for duty? It is by doing a psychic evaluation. In other countries, when a police man has been in a shooting which is a projectile encounter, the next day, you don’t go to duty. You first go to see the psychologist and they debrief you, walk you out of it, they help you to relate to it. You might have killed a man, woman or a child. It will hang on your conscience. But when they work with you and explain it to you and take you through the psychological somersault, the stress would go away, if not, anytime you see someone make a move, you think that they are trying to kill you and you point your own gun. You have to get off the edge of the building that you are trying to jump off. All that violence and low situation that we meet people in life, it keeps pushing you to the edge, to the prison. What the evaluation does is to bring you back from the prison; moves you from the edge and takes back to the general area and you can relate with human beings; you go home and not shoot your wife or beat your kids or start taking alcohol. What if the officer at Ketu was drunk because he had killed so many people and that was a coping mechanism? Maybe he was hearing things in his head. Who cared? Who asked him? Who gave him a psychic evaluation? Nobody! He had people who worked with him. He had a station he was attached to. Go and check. How many incidents was he involved in? He should have a file. Even if they can’t find his family, where is his police file? Where is the history of his transfers? You might find out that this guy has been involved in a lot of high risk environment. Maybe he just came back from Borno State, where people are being blown to bits. So with the least provocation, he would erupt like a time bomb. We need to help our police to understand their own issues. They have issues. It is not enough to say the police are bad, the police are shooting innocents. Why are they shooting innocents? Are they mad people? No they are not. Are they devoid of human feelings or don’t they know that there are laws anymore?
For me, what I see is that the trajectory of the narrative of the police is downhill. What the IGP has said is very useful and important.
Should the psychic evaluation be a one-off thing or a regular check-up?
Regular check-up should be regular. Psychic evaluation is very important because policemen deal with violence on a daily basis. Whether we like it or not, Nigeria has become a very violent society. If two people quarrel right now, you don’t know what will be the outcome. Someone will just go to the extreme and in a short while, someone might be dead. This psychic evaluation is to create a whole man of the policeman, a well-adjusted man. Even though he has seen a lot of violence, he has to deal with it. That is his job, what he signed up for. He is still a human being so it helps him to cope, rationalize and to move on and still provide optimum service to the public that he is serving. In the absence of that, you have a damaged man. Anything can set him off on the wrong path. He will become a danger to society rather than be a help. First it starts with verbalization, then it goes to threats, gesticulation and then you have overt violence. We all as citizens need psychic evaluation because we are exposed to so much violence!
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