The Nigeria Police Force should be modernised

Loius Edet House is the headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF). It is beautiful, wears a good coat of paint, elegant and has all touches of modernity, including IT infrastructure. Foreign or local visitors are awed by the seemingly smooth nature of things in the building. The officers are well kitted, well dressed and sound educated. The impression the officers in the building leave a visitor with are those of efficiency, proper training, alertness and education. It is nothing odd to see a laptop in use on tables. Unfortunately this is just a beautiful impression that is not available nationwide.

Travel from Louis Edet House to the police stations at One Man Village and Masaka in nearby Nasarawa State or in Lokoja town in Kogi State and the contrast shocks you. A lot of the officers exhibit a superiority complex, speak without the humility expected from someone serving the public and ask for payments for services that should be free, ordinarily. To open a case file, a complainant is charged two thousand naira and above, and to have an officer start work on a complaint ‎payments to facilitate movements for investigation have to be made. You also pay for police extracts in cases of loss of documents and for almost everything you need from the officers. Bail is also not free, you pay and even haggle over it.

Withdrawing vehicles that have been involved in an accident is also charged. The average Nigerian police station is like this, whether in the urban or rural setting. Officers that have some conscience tell victims that their superiors will ask for their share of money’s collected. As such they are compelled to collect from the complainant and the accused. Everyone pretends that the Divisional Police Officers (DPOs) do not know that their police stations are banking halls.

NNPC new recruits to begin work on Monday

There is a solution to ‎this manner of criminalisation of police activities. The Nigeria Police Force should use Information Technology (IT) to fight crime and lack of professional conduct. We recommend the development of an application that can be downloaded into the telephone set of every citizen. The citizen should be able to lodge complaints through the app. The app should provide access to the Force Headquarters in Abuja to monitor compliance to standards with regard to how complaints are received, officers assigned to cases and how the cases were concluded. It should also provide an avenue for complaints about unethical conduct. Citizens should be able to preregister a complaint to a police station and get assigned an Investigating Police Officer (IPO) and submit statements, after which a physical contact can be made for investigation. This will ensure that case files do not disappear and the central command can track cases and provide much needed statistics.

To perfect the police application, all forms of backbones and infrastructural support must be provided by the Federal Government while training, retraining and weeding out should be carried out. Other measures that will eliminate collection of bribes and extortions should be in the police app. The Nigeria Police Force should move from its current colonial manner of operation to modernity.