Community Policing in Nigeria

Rationale, Principles, and Practice

Emmanuel C. Onyeozili, Biko Agozino, Augustine Agu, and Patrick Ibe

Virginia Tech Publishing

Blacksburg, Virginia

Community Policing in Nigeria by Emmanuel C. Onyeozili, Biko Agozino, Augustine Agu, and Patrick Ibe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

This book was peer-reviewed prior to publication by Virginia Tech Publishing.

First published in the US in 2021 by Virginia Tech Publishing
First published in Nigeria in 2021 by Fourth Dimension Publishing

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Onyeozili, Emmanuel C. | Agozino, Biko. | Agu, Augustine. | Ibe, Patrick
Title: Community policing in Nigeria: Rationale, Principles, and Practice | Emmanuel C. Onyeozili, Biko Agozino, Augustine Agu, Patrick Ibe.
Description: Blacksburg, VA : Virginia Tech Publishing, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-949373-59-2 (PDF) | ISBN: 978-1-949373-60-8 (epub) | ISBN: 978-1-949373-58-5 (pbk) | DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/community-policing-nigeria
Subjects: BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African Studies. | HISTORY / Africa / West.

Contents

- Advance Praise for Community Policing in Nigeria

- Foreword by Ifi Amadiume

- Foreword by Kimani Nehusi

- Introduction

- 1. The Idea/Theory of Community Policing

- 2. History and Evolution of Modern Policing in Nigeria

- 3. Developing Effective Community-Policing Programs

- 4. Models/Best Practices of Community Policing

- 5. Community Policing Implementation Issues

- Conclusion

- References

- About the Authors

1

Advance Praise for Community Policing in Nigeria

The authors of this book have sliced through the unnecessary and confusing web of half- truths woven around the topic of community policing in Nigeria. This very accessible work has presented the reader and, hopefully, the political class in Nigeria with a rich menu of options. The Nigerian public, the police force itself, and the political class can no longer continue to wallow in confusion over the clear options for community policy. We owe the authors gratitude for providing us with a road map for the implementation of community policing in Nigeria.

— Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah , Catholic Diocese of Sokoto

This book serves as an intellectual path finder on the most auspicious strategy for engaging and stemming the tide of insecurity in Nigeria. Despite the profundity of writings on insecurity in Nigeria, few academic contributions have been made on how to strengthen and expand the scope of security architecture to contain the scourge of insecurity. This lacuna has now been effectively filled.

— Aloysius-Michaels Okolie , University of Nigeria, Nsukka

In this era of Covid-19, enlightened policing is of special urgency. The authors of CommunityPolicingin Nigeria provide us invaluable guidelines to attain this.’

— Gloria Emeagwali , Central Connecticut State University

Community Policing in Nigeria is quite timely going by the debates in the country over its desirability or not. Nigeria is currently plagued by innumerable security threats, and the authors of this volume have contributed to the debate through various perspectives. Highly recommended for security experts, legislators at the National and State Assemblies, scholars, and students of security studies.

— Bernard Steiner Ifekwe , University of Uyo , Nigeria

“African Lives Matter!” is a rallying cry for the 21st century. The roots of modern policing lie in white supremacy, colonial subjugation, and slavery. It is high time that we challenge persistent colonial practices and move to an era of Ubuntu, decolonial feminist, and anti-racist and anti-colonial reimagining of public safety throughout the African continent and across the globe, that humanizes our pan-African citizenry. I congratulate the authors of this book for the timely and African-centric contribution calling for heightened political consciousness among practitioners and a rethinking of what is too often taken for granted.

— Assata Zerai , Univ ersity of New Mexico

This book is a timely intervention into the subject of community policing in Nigeria. The authors are grounded in sound theoretical, empirical, and comparative analyses, and they offer relevant policy recommendations for community policing that take into account indigenous experiences with community policing instead of adopting a Eurocentric approach. It is highly useful for students, scholars, and policy makers in Nigeria and other African countries.

— Jeremiah Dibua , Morgan State University

This book engages rigorously with the genealogy and contemporary contours of community policing in Nigeria. It is a timely intervention at a time of tremendous security problems and overdue return to grassroots-led policing structures. The authors’ analysis is historically sound, theoretically engaging, and empirically nuanced. I warmly recommend this book to scholars, policymakers, and students of policing.

— Temitope B. Oriola , Presi dent, Canadian Association of African Studies

The authors of this book remind us that community self-policing was the order of rule enforcement and the guardian of citizen security in pre-colonial Nigeria. This fact provides the groundwork for a promising community–police partnership against the enduring threats of crime in post-colonial Nigeria. The book is essential reading for academics, policymakers, and practitioners who care about governance in Nigeria and in Africa.

— Anita Kalunta -Crumpton, Texas Southern University

Community Policing in Nigeria takes readers on a fascinating journey into the history of policing and the critical interventionist rationale for community policing as a panacea for the security problem in Nigeria. This book is essential reading for all interested in addressing Nigeria’s policing problematics.

— Chima J. Korieh, Marquette University

This compellingly original and timely book inveighs authoritatively into Nigeria’s ongoing quest for, and debate over, appropriate modalities for policing and forging peace—in a country plagued by criminality, insecurity, group conflict, and a broken police system. Critiquing existing theories and manuals on policing as overly steeped in the ethos of punishment and coercion rather than in the idiom of crime prevention through communal care and watchfulness, CommunityPolicinginNigeria is grounded in a refreshingly African theoretical perspective on peacemaking. Yet this is not just a book of theories and academic arguments. It also offers practical, actionable insights and prescriptions that policymakers, security professionals, and stakeholders will find invaluable. What’s more, the ideas advanced here can be extrapolated to other African countries grappling with similar challenges of escalating crime and flawed policing.

— Moses Ochonu , Vanderbilt University

Community Policing in Nigeria is well timed, especially when Nigeria is descending into a state of security failure. Not only do the authors trace the history of policing in Nigeria, they offer comprehensive strategies for community policing that would help Nigeria maintain peace and order, as well as prevent and apprehend the various kinds of criminal elements that menace the streets of the country. Most important, the book demonstrates that acceptable policing practices were bracketed and ubiquitously practiced in regions of Nigeria before the European invasion and the subsequent introduction of a state militarized police system. This book is a must-read for policy-makers and Nigeria’s educational sectors.

— Ihekwoaba Declan Onwudiwe , Texas Southern University

CommunityPolicinginNigeria represents a bold, exceptional, and refreshing effort by leading Nigerian scholars and professionals to address the major global and perennial security problem of manipulated and flawed policing systems—until now considered out of bounds to all, except the very government bureaucracies that created the problem in the first place. In a major creative departure from the norm, the authors provide scientific theoretical background while identifying a number of community policing models world-wide as appropriate options for governments and communities, especially in the developing world, including Nigeria, to consider, adapt, adopt, and apply as effective community-policing systems to address the prevailing chronic security problem. The authors leave readers with the sobering, thought-provoking message of calling on governments in the developing world to cease policing communities in a police state and instead encourage and support communities to police themselves in a democracy. This book is strongly recommended for all senior civil servants and policy-makers; senior security personnel; development and humanitarian practitioners; aid agencies and donors; political organizations and parties; and academia and research institutions.

— David S. Bassiouni , Chairman and CEO, The Bassiouni Group, and former Deputy Director, UNICEF

The Nigeria Police Force announced in 2019 its adoption of community policing and the establishment of structures for its implementation. And yet the principles and practices of community policing are not adequately understood by many politicians and community leaders in Nigeria, often equating it with ethnic and religious militias and vigilantes. Some state governments have established vigilante groups into which only indigenes are enlisted rather than community residents, making them unrepresentative of the population. The publication of Community Policing in Nigeria is very timely for it explains the historical evolution of western-type police forces in the country during colonial rule and discusses the principles and practices embodied in community policing. I recommend this book to the police and other law enforcement officials, policy-makers, politicians, researchers, and students interested in improved police services in the country.

— Etannibi Alemika , University of Jos, Nigeria

This book is well timed as the post-George Floyd world considers the increasing militarization and brutality of police forces. Many see police in the US and UK, for example, as ridden with an institutionalized racism dating back to colonial times. Countries where these tactics were first fine-tuned include Nigeria and Northern Ireland. The transition to a more civil policing in Nigeria provides a laboratory for social scientists to assess whether and how community policing can come to fruition in post-colonial societies. Building on existing scholarship on the Nigerian police, this erudite book takes the debates forward in a compel- ling and practical way.

— Colin Sumner, University of Sheffiel

2

Foreword by Ifi Amadiume

You might recall the famous line from the poet Maya Angelou’s indictment of the false representation of black people by their oppressors, abusers and colonizers as “twisted lies” (Angelou, 1978).

This book sets the facts straight by tracing the history of the current problems of policing that suppress and punish blacks and minorities—but defend and protect whites and the powerful—the contradictions of a screwed-up system with militaristic origins, locked in a mindset in an upside-down mandate where the arrow continues to point downward against the people, rather than upward at the crimes of the powers that be.

The idea presented here of “democracy of the masses” seems something obvious as a counterforce/weight to abusive power rather than that of those recommending a police state and an intrusion on the hard earned right to privacy.

The suggestion of representative community committees with social awareness and working with various professional experts seems a popular alternative. It is a sensible move to re-educate and socialize the police force, policing, and security systems away from mean punishing.

It is a social awareness that gives presence, voice, and power to “caste-class-gender” and oppressed groups—what in struggle and response to ethnic patriarchy, capitalist patriarchal oppression, and violent abuses we see as presence and power in numbers.

3

Foreword by Kimani Nehusi

In locating policing firmly within the Afrikan tradition, from earliest antiquity to the present, this book returns policing to the people in Afrikan communities. While its focus is on policing within Nigeria, theoretical insights and practical examples, these latter both positive and negative, from around the world are also deployed to illuminate a firm grasp of the evolution of police and policing from colonial times in what is now Nigeria.

The resulting text therefore makes a necessary and radical break with colonial and neocolonial policing in which the police are usually little more—if anything more—than an occupying force organized by Europeans who oppresses the mass of the people on behalf of these foreign masters and their local accomplices, who are junior partners in the exploitation of Afrika.

An honest and rigorous examination of the relevant facts instructs an in-depth understanding of the issues and permits the emergence of imaginative and ground-breaking solutions in the form of bold identification and recommendations of best practices that do not shrink from imagining a greatly transformed future in which policing will be of, by, and for the people in the necessarily updated tradition of the people.

The entirely worthwhile objective is the return of policing from authoritarianism to democracy, from elitist control to people’s control, and the full participation in a twenty-first century environment.

Comprehensive and aware, informative and imaginative, authoritative and solution-oriented, this book is a most important intervention that demonstrates scholarship in the service of the people and offers a model for the study and transformation of the police and other institutions in colonized countries that are serious about decolonization and real development.

4

Introduction

This book is an intervention by a group of scholars who came together, voluntarily and without any funding, to address the gaps in knowledge existing in policy debates and proposals about the need to tackle the escalating insecurity in Nigeria through community policing. The book examines models of community policing around the world and points out best practices and flawed practices that may serve as guides for Nigeria and the rest of Africa. The book is theoretically informed and evidence based as a contribution to the policy debates with room for other scholars to join the debates and contribute ideas that may help to make African communities safer, more prosperous, and wiser.

In this introduction[1] we paint the large picture with broad strokes. It is followed by chapter 1, a theoretical chapter that explores ideas about the origin of professional police organizations and the circumstances that led to the populist demands for community policing around the world. Discourse on policing around the world and especially in Africa tends to avoid theoretical issues and focus almost exclusively on administrative issues. We depart from the technocratic approach by providing a theoretical background before the diuscussion of the organizational issues in line with the call by Azikiwe for Renascent Africa to take the scientific method seriously in all aspects of social organization (Azikiwe, 1937).

The theoretical chapter is followed by a historiography of policing in Nigeria with lessons for the rest of Africa. History shows that modern policing was introduced into Africa by colonizers who followed the Weberian rational ideal bureaucratic model by establishing training, formal qualifications, hierarchies, uniforms, and written rules in order to facilitate command and control. Some readers may be surprised to learn that even after the Northern Protectorate and the Southern Protectorate were amalgamated with the colony of Lagos in 1914 to form what is Nigeria, the Northern region continued to have its own police force until 1930 when the police force was amalgamated to form one centrist Nigerian Police Force.

All that bureaucratization and centralization did not equip the police to prevent or stop (without a single genocidist arrested; intellectuals, the police and the military actually facilitated) the mass killings of Easterners throughout the country and especially in the Middle Belt region before the country descended into a bloody civil war that cost an estimated 3.1 million lives of mostly Easterners in thirty months. At the end of the war in 1970, the Nigerian Police Force was seen as one of the organs that could help to maintain unity without being under the control of regional leaders who could use them to attack perceived enemies. Instead, however, the dictatorial military regimes in the country and their civilian counterparts set the track record of deploying corrupt police officers to attack protesting students and striking workers without protecting the communities under attack by criminal elements.

Chapter 3 surveys issues involved in the development of effective community policing programs and outlines the essential elements of community policing. This is followed by chapter 4, which focuses on models of community policing from around the world. We explore models, best practices, and worst practices of community policing in other parts of the world that are based on indigenous African knowledge systems from which Nigerians and Africans could learn. We warn against the adoption of what Stan Cohen dismissed as “made-for-export” models that remain problematic in industrialized countries but are attractive to policymakers in Africa who seek foreign aid in the forms of police training and equipment from countries where the citizens are now demanding the abolition of the abusive police force and enacting police reforms in an effort to shift resources to democratic community organizations.

Chapter 5 covers the implementation issues associated with community policing with an emphasis on the ability of the community to solve problems that arise in the community. We outline a sample action plan for the implementation of community policing and raise concerns about the receptivity of the formal police organization to innovations that empower the community. Will the governments in Africa be committed to the deepening of democracy by rolling back the legacies of colonialism? And, just as important, will they be committed to empowering communities to be self-governing in keeping with principles of interconnectivity, infinity, self-similarity, recursion, fractal nonlineal geometry, fractional dimensions, or African Fractals that Africans are known to deploy in their designs more than Europeans who prefer Cartesian designs that are easier to dominate, according to Ron Englash (1999) and to Andul Bangura (2012)?

In conclusion, the book differentiates between processes of policing communities in a police state and communities policing themselves in a democracy. We recommend a new approach to community policing in Africa with emphasis on decolonization and the abolition of repressive colonial laws, the erasure of the colonial boundaries, and the restructuration of African communities into the United Republic of African States or the Peoples Republic of Africa. The withering away of the genocidal colonial states imposed on Africa would help to silence the guns across Africa and empower our communities to organize community policing across the ridiculous colonial boundaries that our people transgress on a daily basis in search of their livelihood.

The book defines community policing as the concern of all citizens, since the word police, is derived from polis, a Greek word that means citizens. Given that the modern police force was established for the repressive control of enslaved Africans, the colonized, the disenfranchised, women, and poor workers by the British authorities, our research has convinced us that policing is a task that should go beyond the police force and involve all citizens who say something when they see something going wrong. We are aware of the fact that even in industrialized countries with modern technologies of surveillance, the police only manage to solve about 5 percent of crimes by themselves, while more than 90 percent of crimes are solved because of the alertness of citizens who are willing to come forward as witnesses. This fact is one of the reasons why community policing is increasingly popular around the world while the war-like police force model is declining in popularity because of its propensity toward the abusive use of force without guaranteeing public safety.

In the case of Nigeria, the escalation of terrorist violence by Boko Haram and cattle herders especially in the Northern parts of the country resulted in a war of attrition that forced some local hunters to volunteer to assist the military in fighting the terrorists and in looking for kidnapped truckloads of school girls being used as sex slaves in addition to abuses by security forces in detentions camps as reported by Amnesty International. That is different from what we call community policing because the war on terrorism has gone beyond the task of policing to denote a military mission or warfare, pure and simple. However, the spreading threat of attacks from suspected cattle herders who conflict with farmers over access to grazing land and watering areas and the increased risk of rape, ritual murder, and kidnapping for ransom across the country have combined to raise the cry for the need for community policing in the country.

We are aware that community policing would not be able to solve all these problems and so there is also a need for the political and economic will to modernize cattle rearing in Nigeria by establishing ranches and requiring that feed and water should be taken to the herds instead of forcing the poor herders who have thankfully provided meat to feed the nation for more than a hundred years to continue clashing with the heroic farmers who have fed us with farm crops without any subsidies from the government.

The states of South West Nigeria have passed legislations to authorize Amotekun (or the Leopard) as the name for their version of community policing. The South Eastern states have agreed to form Ebube Agu (awe of the lion) armed security agents to work with the police as the alternative to community policing, but without addressing the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of unarmed youths who were labeled terrorists because they belong to an association called the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). IPOB demands a referendum on the independence of Biafra and has launched its own Eastern Security Network but denied responsibility for attacks against security agents in the Eastern region. In the Northern parts of the country, there are armed militants clashing with communities to prevent cattle rustling and to deter kidnapping or massacres, but they are not declared terrorist groups, only the Boko Haram is known to be a terrorist group in the region. In the South South geopolitical zone, there are Niger Delta militants seeking more control over the resources in the region but the Nigerian government under President Yar’Adua decided to make peace with them through an amnesty program that gave them jobs in return for the promise to end armed attacks against oil workers and oil installations.

Our book considers favorably the peacemaking approaches of our ancestors who had no police force and no prisons but managed to achieve greater security for their lives and properties despite the terrorist raids on our communities by European agents for people to be kidnapped and enslaved for four hundred years. We note that the Nigerian Police Force was established as an army of occupation by the colonizers and therefore, that model of policing remains problematic for postcolonial African societies.

However, we also point out lessons from South Africa where the Inkatha Freedom Party clashed with African National Congress supporters in a black-on-black violence orchestrated by the apartheid regime, and in the Sudan where the Janjaweed militia terrorized the people and where the new republic of South Sudan soon descended into armed conflict between factions of the elites. Additionally, there is Somalia where Al Shabab terrorists specialize in massacring Africans, Liberia where a senseless civil war between armed thugs cost many lives, Libya where Maumer Gadhafi was assassinated with the help of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the country was made ungovernable as terrorists took over, or the Congo where armed warlords have held the people hostage over the control of the rare earth minerals that power the smart technologies of the world.

Not to be forgotten is the Central African Republic where religious sectarianism caused mayhem as sects attacked anyone suspected of belonging to another sect, and Rwanda where hatred was spread on the mass media to target any group of people the way that hate speech was used to mobilize Nigerians against innocent citizens from the former Eastern and Midwestern regions, especially Igbo men, women, and children in a genocidal rage but without any suspects arrested by the police. Horace Campbell (2013) shows that NATO members often act as enablers of these insecurity crises.

All these prove that wherever the people are armed as militias in response to heightened insecurity, they quickly descend into mass violence as one vigilante group clashed with another in defense of war lords. We caution against turning African communities into armed vigilante societies because every time Africans are armed, they tend to use those weapons against fellow Africans just as the arming of Europeans resulted in the first and second imperialist tribal wars between Germany and the world over which group of imperialists would have more colonies in Africa, resulting in the deaths of seventy million people, mostly poor Europeans.

We conclude by calling on African communities to reintroduce education for all on civic engagement and the cultivation of love in the community because without this, the epidemics of rape and violence against women and children in Africa could not be ended by an armed militia or vigilante group, for instance. In Nigeria, no police officer or Boko Haram terrorist has ever been punished adequately for crimes against the masses. Rather, they are often released after allegedly “repenting” and some are reportedly integrated into the police and military forces. Amnesty International has reported widespread abuses of children by both government forces and by Boko Haram suspects that may explain some of the releases of suspects from unlawful detention by the government, but the reintegration process is said to lack transparency, food and medicine are inadequate, and schools are not provided for the children.

In the United States with heavily armed police and military officers and high technologies of surveillance equipment, hundreds of thousands of rape allegations and cases of kidnappings arise every year, but there is very little the authorities can do about them. According to FBI statistics, for every one thousand rape cases reported to the police in the United States, only five suspects are found guilty, leading to the conclusion that prevention is better than conviction in the case of rape (US Department of Justice, 2020). Also, given the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality around the world, we call on all Africans to recognize the lives being wasted with impunity by the police. At the very least, when the police and the military kill unarmed civilians, the government should be sued for reparative justice and should be forced by the courts to pay the families whether or not the officers who conducted the extrajudicial killings are tried and convicted for homicide.

Finally, we call for the training of members of the community on how to use their cell phone videos and cameras to record evidence of crimes and how to set up community blog sites or electronic newspapers where tips on crime can be anonymously updated. Assata Zerai has recommended that information technology access and skills development by African women could help to improve people-oriented governance in Africa (Zerai, 2019). We recommend that houses and streets in the community should be equipped with closed-circuit television cameras powered by solar energy or by wind-power generators when there is no electricity supply from the grid, as is usually the case in Nigeria where we never always expect power.

Commercial establishments in the United States and major streets in the United Kingdom already have CCTV cameras for surveillance despite privacy concerns by many. However, community watchfulness and surveillance, whether relying on information technologies or relying on human eyes and ears or both, should be controlled by the community instead of being used by the government to create a police state that spies on the people and erodes privacy, self-governance, and civil liberties or abuses human rights. If a household sets up a camera to catch a babysitter abusing a child or to catch the neighbors throwing rubbish over their fence, they may resolve the issue privately without involving the police. Jefferson (2020) insists that even though digital technologies are used in the United States to control the people, with more than one hundred million names in crime databases, civil rights groups and the Black Lives Matter movement activists also rely partly on the same digital technologies to hold law enforcement officials accountable. Investigations should be handled by community committees with the emphasis on peacemaking and healing. For instance, a widow could record the destruction of her farm and send the video to community organizations for mediation and possible reparations from the suspected offender without involving the police. Gascon and Roussell (2019) warn against the use of community police advisory boards to extend the coercive powers of the police into the community without empowering the community to hold abusive officers accountable. We are also aware of the warning by Michael Kwet (2018) that social media platforms are serving as surveillance tools for the imperialist states and so, by implication, community policing efforts in the global south should not be based exclusively on centralized social media apps controlled by imperialist countries but more on “people’s technology” directly controlled by the communities.

Above all, we need to avoid the enthronement of toxic masculinity in African communities through the training and arming of vigilante young men with crude weapons, fast cars, and sophisticated weapons by politicians who turn them loose after being elected into office and allow them to run wild, intimidating, robbing, and looting from the suffering masses.

Rather, we recommend that we should learn from women and male youth who have a heroic tradition of nonviolently resisting injustice (Nwankwor and Nkereuwem, 2020). As Chinua Achebe suggested and Desmond Tutu agreed, we need to promote our indigenous Africana philosophy of tolerance through Mbari or Ubuntu in recognition that we are brothers and sisters who inherited what Martin Luther King Jr. called the “world house” that we should share in a beloved community or fight and burn it down with prejudice (Achebe, 2012; Tutu and Tutu, 2014; King, 1967).

We recommend that all community policing committees must be made up of equal numbers of men and women with significant representation of delegates from organized labor, civil society, and women. They should serve primarily as community peacemaking committees by focusing on prevention instead of obsessing about the impossible commodity fetishism of calibrating punishment to fit the cost of crime. Let us remove the hand of the monkey from the soup before it turns into the hand of a human. Let us pursue the black goat in the daylight before nightfall.

1. Parts of the Introduction first appeared in Africa Is a Country, 4 May 2021. https://africasacountry.com/2021/05/beyond-violence-and-militarism ↵

1

The Idea/Theory of Community Policing

What Is Community Policing Theory?

With the mounting insecurity in Nigeria and the brutal militaristic policing of the country, Nigerians have been calling for the introduction of community policing to help to secure rights, lives, and property.[1] The authors responded to the public clamour for justice by collaborating on this book project with a view to offer a theoretical framework and a comparative analysis of best and worst practices of community policing that Nigeria and Africa could learn from. This section of the book aims at contributing to the theorization of the practical concerns of community policing echoed by the #BlackLivesMatter movement around the world. These extracts focus on the theoretical background that could help to inform debates about police brutality and insecurity worldwide with insights from African-centered epistemologies in dialogue with theories from the North. With few exceptions, such discussions focus on the geopolitical North and the few that extend the focus to Africa simply focus on Northern authors, goals, methods, and fears rather than on African interests.

Theory is not magic that only a few people can do but something that every community engages in when they tell stories about their observations of patterns and tendencies that lead to conclusions about the order of things and the expectations of things to come or things to do to change current conditions for the better. Community policing is the practice designed to promote safety and well-being by making peace and by preventing wrongdoing that is found in every community. Being practical, discretionary, and authoritarian, policing tends to be lacking in theory that is systematic and experimental through trial and error but habitually keeps doing the same things and conservatively hopes for the same results. This lack of theory in the practice of policing may be part of the reasons why it is not as effective as people desire in a world that is fast changing that requires thinking outside the box. The lack of theory in this area of life may be as a result of the nature of the problem of crime and social order as things that are not always predictable.

Criminology has many theories of what causes crime and how society responds to criminal behavior but the field of criminal justice science notoriously neglects theory construction while concentrating on administrative strategies of law enforcement, court trials, and corrections. The few theories of criminal justice administration include the precolonial black Africa theory of very peaceful and orderly societies with no need for professional police forces or prisons and with an emphasis on peacemaking, according to Cheikh Anta Diop (1987). Marxist theory recognizes law enforcement as the arm of government that protects the interests of rich people based on their fear that poor people will try and overthrow them and steal their wealth. Even though poor people are overwhelmingly law abiding worldwide, they are convicted and imprisoned even when they are innocent, as Reiman and Leighton (2009) theorized. On the other hand, the rich and powerful people and companies get away with many crimes, especially during the hundreds of years of the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans, during colonialism, during postcolonial genocide, and during apartheid. The majority of the law-abiding masses struggled to bring those systems of criminal injustice oppression to an end (against slavery, sexism, imperialism, Nazism, Jim Crowism, and apartheid) in order to improve public safety with the aim to abolish oppressive laws and make it possible for all to contribute to their communities according to their abilities and give to all according to their needs. Even without having a police force, a court of law, and prisons, indigenous communities without oppression were more humane and safer than oppressive and exploitative police states because wherever there is crime and social injustice, the people will struggle to end it and enthrone social justice for the benefit of all.

The classic work by Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963), indicates that African people were more scared of juju (bad spiritual powers) than they were of the colonial police and the military. Thus, if someone dreamt of sleeping with another man’s wife, he would go and apologize to the husband and pay a fine after waking up to avoid being messed up by the ancestral spirits. Fanon also reported that colonial European police officers institutionalized violence as law and order by torturing Africans; but they also went mad and went home to torture their own wives and children too while the tortured Africans went insane and sometimes ran down the streets screaming that they wanted to kill someone with a kitchen knife.

Similarly, Walter Rodney reported in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) that peace-loving Igbo women declared a nonviolent war against the colonial authorities when they used the oppressive system of “double squeeze” to fix higher prices for imported manufactures like khaki or zinc and also fix lower prices for things like palm oil in 1929. The women won the right not to be taxed and not to have colonial “warrant chiefs” imposed on the indigenous democratic system. The men were forced to pay higher taxes and still the communities tasked themselves to build schools and clinics without much support from the colonizers. Having been forced to work for wages to earn money for taxes and levies, Rodney also recognized the sit-down strike by Nigerian coal miners who demanded to be paid living wages but who were massacred in Enugu in 1949. Against propaganda that regarded the 1967–1970 genocide against the Igbo in Biafra as the result of tribal conflict for which no genocidist was arrested or tried and no apology or reparations offered, Rodney observed that prior to colonization, the neighbors of the Igbo never ganged up against them to commit genocide perhaps because there is no African tribe known as Shell BP or the Labour Party government of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union that orchestrated the genocide. He concluded that under colonialism (and neocolonialism by extension), the maintenance of law and order amounts to the maintenance of conditions favorable to exploitation. In an earlier book, The Groundings with My Brothers (1969), Rodney recognized the Igbo as among the African nations that practiced direct democracy without kings and queens, and he called on researchers to study this system of government to draw out good lessons. The military dictatorship of Olusegun Obasanjo tried to undermine this indigenous democratic system by imposing “traditional rulers” on the republican Igbo in 1976 despite the resounding victory won by Igbo women against such colonial “warrant chiefs” in 1929, according to Adiele Afigbo in The Warrant Chiefs (1972).

The classic work by Stuart Hall and colleagues, Policing the Crisis (1978), examined the discriminatory ways that the police targeted people of African descent in the United Kingdom as if they were an internal colony to be controlled by force rather than by consent in a democracy. Drawing lessons from the policing of enslaved Africans and from apartheid South Africa, the book demonstrated that when authoritarian populism is allowed to target a group of people for repression, it is the entire society that suffers as a consequence. In other words, poor white people in the United Kingdom and the United States also suffered from the use of the police to oppress poor black people and it would be in the interest of all to elect governments that are accountable to the poor so that policies would be put in place to end oppression and exploitation. Otherwise, the police would continue to be known as what Rastafarians call oppressive “Babylon” forces.

A key problem with the Marxist theory of criminal justice administration is that it appears to promise too much by implying that it is possible to allow the law and even the state to wither away, as Lenin put it following Friedrich Engels, so that communities can move from class rule to the administration of things in line with the principles of needs and capacities. Angela Davis argues that it is not utopian to imagine a more humane future with obsolescence of prisons, racism, sexism, exploitation, war, and imperialism, much like the way that indigenous societies lived for thousands of years before the conquest by capitalism and imperialism. Critics point out that actually existing socialist states have made more repressive laws and strengthened the proletarian state rather than allow socialist law and the dictatorship of the proletariat to wither away. Socialist countries should have been the first to abolish capitalist capital punishment and end the war on drugs, for instance, long before capitalist countries did. Ruth Gilmore convincingly argues that it is possible to abolish prisons and defund the police to free resources for community efforts to promote justice, peace, and love without having to rely on what she called the Golden Gulag (2007) of mass incarceration as an alternative to the original indigenous systems of justice.

In Anthills of the Savannah, Nigerian literary scholar Chinua Achebe (1987) spoke through the character of Ikem Osodi, a satirical editor of the National Gazette who gave a speech at a university and the students asked him if he believed in the dictatorship of the workers. He answered that he did not believe in a dictatorship of any sort, and he asked the students why they dreamed of ruling by dictatorship under a military dictatorship when they could not even organize peaceful students’ union elections free of fraud and intimidation. We agree with Achebe’s implication that community policing should be governed by the democracy of the masses and not by dictatorship of any sort, certainly not by genocidal racist-imperialist-patriarchal dictatorship, lest it is hijacked by elites addicted to the intoxicating drink of absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

Other theorists who support the oppressive powers of the rich disagreed with Marx about the intersectional oppressive class-race-gender character of law enforcement and criminal justice under capitalism (Agozino, 2020). Emile Durkheim (1893) suggested that social control of deviance simply evolves as society evolves from what he called “mechanical solidarity” when allegiance to norms is automatic; to “organic solidarity” when industrialization brings about specialist organs with increased rules that people may choose to follow in their different areas of work. For instance, in the distant past, there were only few laws or commandments such as “thou shall not kill; thou shall not steal” or even fewer rules like “do unto others as you would like them to do unto you.” Durkheim spoke for the capitalist ruling class by assuming that punishment becomes less severe as the law evolves from sacred to profane rules.

According to Durkheim (1893) and without reference to the African holocaust during slavery, punishment tended to be more severe in those days because crimes against sacred rules were fewer. But as rules increased in density, punishment became less severe in secular societies where the deprivation of liberty (prison) or monetary fine became the major forms of punishment. For this reason, social control is very popular in every community as a means of uniting the people around what they collectively accept as their norms. When social change is rapid as could happen during a revolution, what people expect is no longer what they experience and so there would be an increase in deviance due to such “anomie.” The social control mechanisms serve the function of restoring the equilibrium in the society by rewarding law-abiding behaviors and punishing deviant ones. But deviance can never be completely prevented because it serves positive and essential functions in society, according to him.

African ancestors had no police force nor a court of law nor a prison to enforce those commandments against abomination, but there were no cases of kidnapping, corruption, bribery, theft, rape, genocide, or slavery except when Arabs and Europeans arrived to hunt Africans as prey for hundreds of years. Where Durkheim was mistaken is that he believed that every community has a collective conscience that governs their norms whereas the conscience of those who dominate a society is often in conflict with the conscience of the masses who are opposed to oppression and exploitation. Whose conscience was the collective conscience under apartheid, colonialism, or slavery?

Another theorist, Max Weber (1924), agreed that there is often conflict of interests in any community, giving rise to the domination of some over others. But he also disagreed with Marx about how to solve such conflicts. Marx preferred a complete revolution to change the structure of the society in the interest of all but Weber preferred a system of reforms to eliminate discrimination in the administration of justice through the rational ideal bureaucracy. According to him, there are three forms of authority when it comes to the administration of justice (viz. traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic).

Traditional authority depends on the knowledge of elders regarding what the culture or tradition accepts as normal and younger generations accept the opinions of the elders mechanically without question. But as society changes, charismatic, religious authorities emerge to prophesy that God is angry because people are following their own hearts. People may look up to the charismatic leaders to come up with new laws of how to live a life of justice. Eventually, the charismatic leader is forced to routinize his authority by writing down the new rules to approximate bureaucratization and allow representatives to be elected to make the laws while professionally trained officials are organized in a hierarchy of authority to implement the laws without discrimination through the bureaucracy.

However, even Weber agreed that his rational ideal bureaucracy could result in what he called an “iron cage” that is inflexible in the administration of justice and that could result in caste-class-gender injustice. But he believed that the bureaucracy is the most technically superior way to administer justice in any society. He was not keen on democratic administration because he saw democracy as a form of domination by elites over others, and he ruled out pure democracy where all heads are equal. What the theory of Weber lacks is the element of compassion for the suffering of others (Bauman, 1989). Community policing, popular justice, and reparative justice may be better ways of administering justice in democratic societies than the rational ideal bureaucracy. The Nigerian Police Force, for example, is a bureaucratic organization, but it is not capable of providing safety for communities unless the communities organize to defend themselves. The Nazi forces were also bureaucratized in a way that Weber would find rational and ideal but rather than deliver justice, they embarked on huge crimes against humanity until they were defeated by the allied forces. Nigerian governors are demanding state police formations that would report to them and then through them to the federal police and thereby entrench the security state ideology that would further take power away from communities rather than empower community self-governance.

Just dessert theorists in Europe proposed what Pashukanis (1924), following Marx, called the “commodity fetishism” in law, a capitalist system that places value on anything by treating it like a commodity to be exchanged in the market. According to Pashukanis, capitalist law insists punishment should be made to fit the crime as if someone were buying a commodity at a price calibrated to fit the value of the commodity. The trouble with commodity fetishism in law is that some crimes are so severe that no punishment would ever be calibrated to fit the seriousness of the crime. Besides, in capitalist societies like Nigeria, the crimes of the powerful are rarely calibrated under commodity fetishism to exact the fitting punishment but are treated with impunity while the poor and the powerless get given excessive punishment even when they are innocent, as Agozino theorized in Black Women and the Criminal Justice System (1997) and also in Counter-Colonial Criminology(2003).

Community policing calls for a return to our indigenous peace-making methods of social control by teaching vigilance, love, forgiveness, and respect; and by watching out for our brothers and sisters as ways to prevent crimes rather than rely exclusively on colonialist policing and the punishment of offenders. Only then will the youth stop protesting and demonstrating against the Serious Armed Robbery Squad (SARS), a mobile armed security unit deployed by the federal government. The youth continued to protest on the streets, demanding an end to the unit with the hashtag, #EndSARS, despite dozens of them being shot and killed for expressing their freedom in 2020. The global #BlackLivesMatter movement directly supports our conclusion, in line with Angela Davis (2003), Ruth Gilmore (2007), Julia Chinyere Opara (2005), and Viviane Saleh-Hanna (2015), among others, the hauntology of imperialist systems of policing need to be abolished to make way for more humane socialist management of the affairs of communities with inspiration from critical race theory of race-class-gender intersectionality or articulation.

What Is Community Policing?

Policing is always wider than the professional police, which is an institution that emerged as recently as 1829 in Britain and quickly spread across the world. Prior to the emergence of a “professional police force,” the common law practice of night watchmen, vigilantism, or the raising of hue and cries were the strategies relied upon to maintain law and order while businesses and the rich relied on hiring night watchmen. With the increase in industrialization, there was a need for specialization and an increased division of labor and professionalization in all walks of life. Yet, people did not trust the government having repressive powers over citizens especially in England where the Magna Carta guaranteed rights to the citizens under common law except when there was specific legislation forbidding a certain act or omission (Lyman, 1964).

Most citizens had every right to mistrust the government because it was not a democratic government given that only 11 percent of adult men, and no women, had the right to vote based on property ownership. When the working people rallied to demand the right to vote in 1818 in Manchester, the volunteer force of yeomen were called in and they rode roughshod on horseback wounding many women, children, and workers who fought back. Then armed troops with bayonets were called in to restore law and order and more people were killed and wounded. The uproar resulted in the reconsideration of the reliance on vigilantes or the payment by businessowners to armed gangs for the protection of their properties. The then home secretary, Robert Peel, came up with the idea of a trained and uniformed police “service” to maintain order, with the consent of the people and not by force.

The people were having none of that. There were massive demonstrations against the idea of having an armed branch of the government with the power to deprive the people of their fundamental freedom of movement. The government explained that this was not a threat to law-abiding citizens who would be protected by the police and by the community while the police were to be armed with only night sticks and not with bayonets. Only those who were up to no good would have anything to fear. But the people were very afraid of the police in a country with the recent history of the bloody assizes where there were death penalties for things like hunting, fishing, or gathering firewood from the king’s forest; where millions of Africans were owned as property in distant colonies for hundreds of years; where no poor workers and no woman had the right to vote; and where the poor were punished with transportation to far colonies on trumped up charges.

The government performed an incredible feat by getting the public to accept that industrialization was changing society so fast that reliance on the informal ways of maintaining order was no longer feasible for the control of the increasing numbers of pauperized criminal elements dramatized by the stories of Oliver Twist and Robin Hood (though neither Oliver nor Robin committed any real crimes).

The hegemonic victory of the government as an intellectual and moral leader was so complete that even people on the ideological left have since come to accept that the maintenance of law and order is “an unqualified human good” even under oppressive laws as E. P. Thompson (1975) stated in Whigs and Hunters. The government must have won such a resounding victory by appealing to the fear of crime even among the poor and the middle class alike who demand more police presence in poor communities to protect them from poor desperadoes. With the population of formerly enslaved Africans increasing in England after the abolition of the slave trade and with poor workers increasingly restive about what Engels (1845) called the Conditions of the Working Class in England, it was easy for the government to convince citizens that the police would be there to protect girls from rapists and to help old ladies cross the streets while making sure that the loony left would not destroy the British tradition of honest hard work for honest pay.

As soon as the government won widespread support for the institutionalization of the police in Britain, the plantation owners in the Americas quickly copied the model as a more efficient way to keep the millions of enslaved Africans and impoverished white workers in check. With the story of the incredible victory of the Haitian revolutionaries over a succession of the best armies of white invaders still fresh in their ears, it must have been easy for governments in the Americas to convince their workers to pay higher taxes to support a professional police service. Instead of paying enslaved-people catchers or using a volunteer posse to capture runaway slaves, the plantation owners could rely on a force trained and armed by the government to do their dirty jobs for them.

The model of police service with unarmed officers or “bobbies” (named after Sir Robert “Bobby” Peel) patrolling the streets of London and relying on the logic of Sherlock Holmes to solve crimes with the support of the people was different from the policing of colonial locations like the plantations of the Caribbean and the colonies of Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Africa and India where the preferred model was what Philip Ahire (1991) termed militarized ImperialPolicing. In West Africa, the British colonizers adopted this model by relying on what Onyeozili (2004) theorized as “Gunboat Criminology” as the preferred mechanism for the conquest and pacification of the natives and for the regular policing of the colonies. They also had what they called “court messengers” or kotima who were only armed with batons but made it clear that any group of people challenging colonial authority would be read the riot act and would be violently suppressed by calling in the colonial army.

This was the experience of the Ashanti who defeated the British invading army but were later subdued with the aid of the newly invented repeat-action rifles and with an alliance between the invaders and the traditional rivals of the Ashanti, the Fante confederation. The British sent their army of conscripts to Benin in what they called a punitive expedition, but they were in fact a group of armed robbers who looted the treasures of the kingdom and shamelessly displayed the loot in the British Museum to attract tourists who contribute enormously to the economy.

In Eastern Nigeria, the Ekumeku resistance war lasted for years while King Jaja of Opobo was being duped—having been invited for a meeting on a British Naval Squadron boat and then subdued with naval forces before being deported to the Caribbean to make way for the complete domination of British companies over the lucrative trade in palm oil. Yet, the people continued to resist in the form of the defiance by Aro middlemen from Arochukwu who wanted to retain the control of trade in palm oil in the interior. But the Aro were subdued by the terroristic burning of their Long Juju shrine by British troops who falsely claimed that they did it to stop the slave trade that they themselves launched and ran for hundreds of years before abolishing it under pressure from militant enslaved Africans and their allies, according to Chinweizu (1975) in The West and the Rest of Us.

The idea of community policing emerged to underscore the fact that except the community keeps watch, the police only lose sleep in vain. There will never be enough police officers to keep everyone under surveillance in order to stop crimes or to prevent them. More than 90 percent of crimes are solved only with information from members of the community. The exception is in cases where the crimes involve consenting adults—for instance, prostitution or drugs, especially when no violence is involved. In most other cases, the police cannot solve crimes if citizens do not risk becoming witnesses ready to testify or anonymously tip off officers about a crime. As the saying goes, you cannot spell community without unity, nor can you spell it without I, and I cannot spell it without U. It is the community that is best equipped to observe crimes and report them or try to stop them especially in poor countries like Nigeria where the officers remain at roadblocks looking for bribes from motorists or sit behind their desks demanding bribes. But even in rich countries like Japan, China, and Singapore policing is community-orientated with the expectation that members of the community will be the ones who will say something when they see something going wrong.

Many Western European governments and governments from North America admired the miracle of low crimes and falling prison populations in the rich countries of Asia. They sent their criminologists to study the Asian model and see if they could apply the lessons to policing in countries like the United States, with its alarmingly increasing prison industrial complex. What they found out, according to Phillip Reichel (1994) in Comparative Justice Systems, was that Japan retained a strong community-based moral value system that the Western countries lacked. For instance, the worst punishment for a naughty child in Japan would be to lock the child outside the home. But if you lock an American child outside of the home, the child will probably disappear to the mall and spend money like a rock star because the United States operates under the moral system of radical individualism where there is no shame for a child to scream at the parents and say, “I hate you,” or call the police and child protective service to arrest the parents. To Americans, the worst punishment for children is to lock them inside the bedroom away from their friends (even though they can still talk to their friends on their smartphones).

Reichel explained that the Japanese use the metaphor of the Bonsai plant that is groomed from inception to grow in controlled patterns to explain the fact that most Americans would not tolerate the cultural constraints that produced the ordered society of Japan. Thus, more than 90 percent of cases that go to court in Japan result in guilty confessions and the plea for mitigation in punishment and more than 90 percent get suspended sentences; whereas many offenders in the United States are unrepentant despite of, or because of the heavy reliance on plea-bargaining to settle cases in more than 90 percent of US cases. The community-policing approach in Japan works because the police officer is posted to the neighborhood bloc and lives among neighbors who respect him as the Honorable Mister Walkabout. The United States prefers the heavily armed police officer cruising in a car and racially profiling members of the community who are frequently shot and killed.

The idea of community policing is appealing especially because if members of the community decide to physically assault their own children or sexually abuse members of their community, the police may never hear of it and the crime may continue indefinitely. However, if members of the community decide to end a criminal practice by rising up against it (offenses such as female genital mutilation, child abandonment, discrimination against Osu caste members, rape, or wife battering have been outlawed as crimes) the community can more easily identify the culprits and try to put a stop to it. Because the community does not have the repressive powers of the police, members of the community might decide to punish offenders by temporarily excommunicating them or by making them pay a fine rather than relying on excessive force. This is especially the case in instances where the offence is something like fishing in a river where fishing is prohibited by tradition or in cases of drunkenness and adultery. Usually, when the offender apologizes and asks for forgiveness, there is reconciliation and the restoration of peace in the community in ways more effective than punitive justice by the police force and the criminal justice system.

Some Nigerians brag that their region controls all the security arms of the government as if they are still under a military dictatorship but their region also suffers the greatest levels of insecurity because, according to an old Igbo saying, the person who kills with the knife dies by the knife. Arming cattle herders so that they can kill poachers or using the military to torture, kill, and detain South East youth simply for exercising their democratic rights to freedom of expression is to risk the wellbeing of the entire nation by militarizing civil society and curtailing the freedom of all citizens. Communities should beware of organizing vigilante groups trained and armed for self-defense because chances are that such groups would be used against members of the community in elite struggles for political patronage.

The Scientific Method and Community Policing

Policing is regarded by Europeans as a science that could be taught and practiced with objectivity. However, crime is messy and chaotic to such an extent that the type of science involved is not always reliable and objective. In Europe and settler colonial locations, the streets are planned in Cartesian patterns of grids to make it easy for the police or the fire brigade to block off trouble and deal with it forcefully. In Africa, where people had been hunted as prey and kidnapped or subjected to genocide for centuries, we choose to design our streets in a chaotic pattern known as African Fractals to make it difficult for any enemies to catch us (Eglash, 1999; and Bangura, 2012). Initially, Europeans tried to dismiss nonlineal geometry as irrational, but they have since discovered that the principles of interconnectedness, fractional dimensions, self-similarity, recursion, infinity, and chaos could be used to design cyberspace in such a way that it is difficult for dictators to control Internet communities. The same principles of African fractals can be applied to community policing because crime and deviance are not lineal, they are fractal and chaotic.

This is part of the reasons why there is an increasing demand for community policing around the world and particularly in Nigeria with the full understanding that even without being trained scientists, members of the community have a vested interest in maintaining peaceful coexistence. With all the scientific equipment in the world, the police will never be able to monopolize the maintenance of order in any community, but the community can maintain peaceful coexistence even without the police force.

We conclude this chapter by observing that policing is too important to be left to trained officers alone. Science is simply the system of systematic observation of events in nature to test preliminary assumptions or to lead to generalizations that could be subjected to further tests as part of the efforts to construct theories for future testing. The scientific method is not foolproof but is error prone and members of the community can certainly police themselves by relying on objective observations that are verifiable to produce expectations and assumptions that are testable for sound conclusion. This scientific method was recommended to Africans by Azikiwe in Renascent Africa in 1937 but two years later, Awolowo (1939) disagreed and recommended juju as a scientific method with which Africans could kill their enemies by mentioning their names three times at a road junction or simply use it to vanish from police detention. At that time, Nigerians believed that Azikiwe (popularly known as Zik) must have received supernatural powers from Mami Wata (Mermaid) to make him bold enough to challenge the unjust colonial rule of the British. Zik told them that he had no juju and that he relied on social science by establishing newspapers to inform the people and by mobilizing them to fight for their rights. We hope that Africans will learn from Azikiwe by setting up online newspapers for their communities so that members of the community can report missing people or crimes and thereby mobilize the community to help to arrest the offenders and stop crimes.

In conventional policing, we are made to believe that the trained officers rely on finger printing and DNA evidence or forensic science that would help them to identify the suspects and their motives so that justice would be speedily done. On the contrary, such a fantastic scientific model of policing is rare even in Hollywood or Nollywood movies where intimidation, oracles, and psychics are sometimes relied upon to solve cases. Regular police officers tend to operate under what is known as the deductive logic in research design. They start with the broad theory that there is a legal code to be enforced and that those who break the code are breaking the social contract that binds everyone together; and so, they are asking to be punished. However, community policing starts from the assumption that the direct observation of a crime is not always possible and so members of the community may rely more on grounded theory to build up from specific observations toward a general conclusion of “who done it” or how to prevent it from being done in the first place. We believe that this inductive logic is also applicable to regular police work but the ideology of scientism gives the mistaken impression that the police can solve crimes on their own with or without the support of the community.

Accordingly, we recommend that the inductive logic of grounded theory should be openly taught in the community to equip everyone with the knowledge of the principles of systematic observation, documentation, and testing of hypotheses without prejudice against some members of the community and without violence. For instance, the community should be taught how to operate a Facebook or blog site with designated phone numbers where stories of missing people could be uploaded and crime events reported to alert every member of the community to be on the lookout for the offenders and the victims. Those who have smartphones should be taught how to record evidence and how to present the evidence systematically. Since even science can make mistakes, we propose that community policing should involve community training on validity, reliability, and ethical issues in research to avoid jumping to flawed conclusions and to avoid doing harm to the reputation of innocent suspects and vulnerable victims. We encourage every community to learn how to make peace between conflicting individuals through forgiveness and restitution to avoid the escalation of violence and vendetta.

“The Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2020—$738 billion—was the largest on record” and came “at the expense of healthcare, education, infrastructure spending, and public health research. For years, our government has failed to invest in programs that actually keep our country safe and healthy. By over-prioritizing the Pentagon and military solutions, our country is drastically underprepared for any crisis that needs a non-military solution,” said Congresswoman Barbara Lee in 2020.

African rulers should go beyond the shedding of crocodile tears over the murder of George Floyd by the US police and recognize that the police forces imposed by colonizers were designed to kill Africans in genocidal proportions. Decolonize the police and prisons in Africa! Reunite Africans in the Federal Republic of African States or the Peoples Republic of Africas. As Igbo women often sing, “Udo ga adi ebe ifunanya di”; “there will be peace where there is love. Love one another, Africans.” Forgive the unforgivable the way people of African descent forgave the holocaust of enslavement as recunted by Du Bois in Black Reconstruction; the way the Igbo forgave genocide in Biafra as recounted by Achebe (2012) in There Was a Country, by Nwankwo (1972) in Nigeria: The Challenge of Biafra, and by Ekwe-Ekwe (2006) in Biafra Revisited; and the way the South Africans forgave the crimes of aparthied without seeking punitive justice while seeking reparative justice as recounted by Tutu and Tutu (2014). Love the enemy as yourself: sometimes you are your own worst enemy.

Derrida (2001) examined the claim that forgiveness comes to us from the Abrahamic religions of the Book. However, he found that while all the three Abrahamic faiths preach forgiveness, each one appears to reserve punishment for that which is deemed unforgivable. Derrida argues that true forgivenss is infinite and always open in an ever-merciful way that can be found exemplarily in the Africana tradition of the forgiveness of the unforgivable. In TheBook of Forgiving, Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu (2014) teach that there is nothing that is not forgivable and there is no one who does not deserve to be forgiven something. Ask for forgiveness and forgive others in order to heal the the self and the community.

We believe that there are good and dedicated officers in every police force but, it is simply impossible to accept that bad apples were responsible for the refusal to apologize for the failure to arrest even a single suspect or just open an investigation into mass killings during the genocide against millions of the Igbo, as Achebe documented in There Was a Country and as Soyinka (1993) mourned in The Man Died. Similarly, it is not true that mediocrity or incompetence is responsible for the fact that the police have not managed to convict even a single terrorist suspect or murderous cattle herder the way they sometimes arrested and convicted armed robbers and fraudsters or the way they attacked nonviolent prodemocracy protesters and detained journalists without trial. The problems of prejudicial abuse of power, corruption, and extrajudicial killings by the police in the face of mounting insecurity appear to be systemic and defy solution by relying exclusively on the colonial police structures designed to occupy the land and intimidate the people rather than defend their rights and protect their property as Achebe (1983) observed in The Trouble with Nigeria.

These failures are part of the reasons why the clamour for community policing is rising given that what we have does not appear to be working in the public’s interests. This book encourages us to examine the intricacies of community policing lest we clone the oppressive structures of the genocidal colonial police state and deepen the use of fear and force to keep people under subjugation but without reducing insecurity. People should not see community policing as the only solution in societies under the domination of racist-imperialist-patriarchy. We believe that civic eduction for all in the community would raise empathy for the sufferings of fellow Africans, but we also need to restructure the inherited legacies of colonial domination in order to increase civic engagement and self-efficacy for social justice. Without a law court, a police force, or prison-industrial complex, ancient Africans maintained self-discipline and peace by adhering to the 42 Laws of Maat, the goddess of justice who weights all souls on a scale before allowing those who observed Maat to pass to Arus (world of the ancestors), according to chapter 125 of the Papyrus of Ani (Karenga, 2006):

I have not committed sin.
I have not committed robbery with violence.
I have not stolen.
I have not slain men or women.
I have not stolen food.
I have not swindled offerings.
I have not stolen from God/Goddess.
I have not told lies.
I have not carried away food.
I have not cursed.
I have not closed my ears to truth.
I have not committed adultery.
I have not made anyone cry.
I have not felt sorrow without reason.
I have not assaulted anyone.
I am not deceitful.
I have not stolen anyone’s land.
I have not been an eavesdropper.
I have not falsely accused anyone.
I have not been angry without reason.
I have not seduced anyone’s wife.
I have not polluted myself.
I have not terrorized anyone.
I have not disobeyed the Law.
I have not been exclusively angry.
I have not cursed God/Goddess.
I have not behaved with violence.
I have not caused disruption of peace.
I have not acted hastily or without thought.
I have not overstepped my boundaries of concern.
I have not exaggerated my words when speaking.
I have not worked evil.
I have not used evil thoughts, words, or deeds.
I have not polluted the water.
I have not spoken angrily or arrogantly.
I have not cursed anyone in thought, word or deeds.
I have not placed myself on a pedestal.
I have not stolen what belongs to God/Goddess.
I have not stolen from or disrespected the deceased.
I have not taken food from a child.
I have not acted with insolence.
I have not destroyed property belonging to God/Goddess.

This book’s cover illustration comes from classical African writings and paintings in ancient Egypt dating back to about five thousand years ago, depicting the judgment over the souls of people to see if they have observed Maat or truth and justice in their lifetime. The scale of justice used in law courts today dates back to the early African imagination and, the Ten Commandments of Moses who may have borrowed them from the 42 laws of Maat listed above. By coincidence, some of the words they used sound familiar to the Igbo as Catherine Acholonu (2010) maintained—Arus is almost Arusi, and Ani is Mother Earth, even Isis sounds like the beginning or isi isi, the “beginning of the beginning” or “head of head,” in Igbo (if pronounced like Africans or the way that Ethiopians pronounce the name today and not like Europeans who would say Aisis instead of Isisi as in Genesis—jeenaisiisi in Igbo—go to the beginning). The ancient Egyptians and Jews may have come from NdiIgbo, or early humans, ndigboo—who are coincidentally called the Jews of Africa by many today. Perhaps it is the Jews who are the Igbo of the Middle East because human life originated in Africa and not in the Middle East.

1. The first section of this chapter is excerpted from “What is Community Policing Theory?” Antipode Online, 13 January 2021. https://antipodeonline.org/2021/01/13/community-policing-theory/ ↵

2

History and Evolution of Modern Policing in Nigeria

Establishment of “Formal” Policing In Nigeria

The police are the most visible entity of the criminal justice system and, by design, one of the few public organizations that respond to calls for service (Holden, 1986). The history of organized police dates back to England, where the first modern metropolitan police force was created in 1829 to take over the role of the security constables. Among the reasons for the founding of Britain’s organized police were: the widespread corruption of the constables and the justices; the Industrial Revolution and consequent growlth in wealth and population of towns, which multiplied opportunities for crime; and the breakdown of law and order (Critchley, 1967; Hart, 1951)

The Need for Nigerian Police

In Nigeria however, the idea of establishing the police had no bearing to the same reasons it was established in England. Rather, the establishment of policing was designed to serve the colonial needs of oppression and exploitation. Beginning in 1845, the British became more involved in the affairs of Lagos. They were also experiencing some serious law-enforcement problems in their self-imposed task of “protecting the lives and property of the indigenous people,” the European merchants, other businessmen, and Christian missionaries (Tamuno, 1970). Owing to this involvement, in 1851, the British Navy bombarded Lagos into submission, sacked King Kosoko, and installed the puppet Oba Akitoye on the throne of Lagos (Ikime, 1977). In 1861, ten years after the attack, Lagos was “formally” annexed and made a British colony.

It is obvious that while Akitoye was willing to sign the British treaty to regain the throne, he was not willing to cede Lagos to the British. When he died in 1853, he was succeeded by his son Dosunmu (Docemo in some versions), who in turn was pressured into signing a treaty agreeing to British occupation of Lagos. This period between 1852 and 1861 was a period of informal jurisdiction and had an important bearing on the origin, development, and role of the modern Nigerian Police Force that began in Lagos (Tamuno, 1970).

It is quite clear, as Ikime (1977) stated, that Lagos was not bombarded in 1851 because Kosoko was a notorious slave trader, nor did the British take over full powers in 1861 because Dosunmu, the new oba (king), had revived the slave trade. The real issue, therefore, was the British determination to control the trade of Lagos and the Yoruba hinterland. However, it was not long before they realized that the organizational arrangement in the Lagos area during that period failed to provide the necessary security for commerce and other pursuits.

Apart from the succession debacles that later plagued Lagos in the 1940s and 1950s, there were other developments in the region that had important bearings on the security of Lagos. These events were the consequences of the Yoruba wars of the nineteenth century that threatened the security of areas like Ikorodu and Egbaland, which were Lagos’s next-door neighboring kingdoms. Particularly alarming was the reality of the alliance between the exiled King Kosoko and King Ghezo of Dahomey, which threatened lives and the chances of “legitimate” commerce (of British merchants) on Lagos Island (Tamuno, 1970).

Common sense and prudence, therefore, dictated anxiety on the part of the British Consul and European residents to have armed forces at their disposal to protect their commercial interests. In response, Consul Foote proposed the establishment of a consular guard of one hundred men to be permanently stationed in Lagos, and controlled by consular agents. This marked the first idea of a police force in colonial Nigeria. Foote’s request, however, was turned down because of the reluctance of the Foreign Office to commit British capital to Lagos without assurance of any returns.

Unlike the British, Ahire (1991) has argued that the emerging ruling class in colonial Nigeria was a foreign and illegitimate one that sought to dominate and exploit the indigenous people in the interest of its own metropolitan economy. The effort of this foreign ruling class to subdue the indigenous people, and to impose a careful surveillance over them in order to forestall any popular rebellion, created an obsession with the policing of public order. The result was to resort to conversion of the Hausa constabulary into a police force to protect British merchants in Lagos.

The Hausa Police

The sudden death of Consul Foote in 1861 led to the appointment of William McCoskry as the acting governor of Lagos Colony. In the effort to tighten its grip on the affairs of Lagos and ensure full control, McCoskry organized and established the nucleus of the first police force—a Hausa constabulary of thirty men (Tamuno, 1970; The Nigerian Police Force, 1981). This formation marked the beginning of the first modern police in the history of Lagos. It was also the first modern police force in the territories later designated Nigeria by the British (Tamuno, 1970).

One distinctive feature of the Hausa constabulary was that it was mainly military in character, although the men did perform some civil police duties. For this, Ahire (1991) has pointed out that the nineteenth-century policing in Britain cannot be substituted wholesale for the policing experience of colonial Nigeria, even though its basic logic is generally relevant. For modern historians the paramilitary nature of the new police symbolizes the evidence of imperial authority in Lagos. The police performed essentially beat duties at the trading depots of the British merchants, and at the same time became the object of incessant attacks from the public who resented their presence.

In the next year the strength of the constabulary was augmented to one hundred men to form the “Armed Police Force.” By October 1863 the strength rose to six hundred and was called the “Armed Hausa Police Force,” because it consisted mainly of Hausa-speaking ex-slaves from Sierra Leone (Ahire, 1991). Earlier, in 1862, a battalion of the West Indian Regiment had been moved from Gambia to Lagos to complement the new police force.

With the police in place, Henry Stanhope Freeman, the new governor (1862–1865), established four different courts—a police court, a commercial court, a criminal court, and a slave court. The police court, manned exclusively by the police, settled all petty cases. The criminal court, chaired by a stipendiary magistrate assisted by two British merchants as assessors, handled the more serious cases. The slave court (staffed exactly like the criminal court) heard cases relating to slavery. The commercial court, manned exclusively by British merchants, handled all cases of debts and breach of contract (Ahire, 1991).

The relevance of this judicial setup was fourfold. The first was the prominence given to British commercial interests in the new system of courts. The second was the total absence of Nigerians in a facet of judicial administration that had their interest as a prime target. Third was the inextricable implication of the colonial government in private British commercial concerns. Fourth was the obviously ominous future and inevitable public perception of the colonial police who were employed by all these courts to maintain social control.

This early employment of police resources to advance the colonial political agenda in fact shaped the future of policing as an agency of oppression in the whole history of Nigeria. Many historians and criminologists—for example, Alemika (1988), Ahire (1991), Ikime (1977), Crowder (1978a), Tamuno (1970)—are of the opinion that the preoccupations of the police during the colonial era were tied solely to British ambitions in Nigeria. Their view, according to Alemika (1988) has been that the colonial state ultimately rests on force and violence and the capacity to realize its ambition despite opposition from the colonized peoples. In Alemika’s words: “The colonial objectives were (to varying degrees during the phases of colonialism in Nigeria) prosecuted through organised governmental violence, vandalism and plunder on the part of the colonizers… The sundry administrative, coercive and surveillance organs (police, prisons, courts, tribunals, ‘native’ authorities, Residents and District Officers) were established to prosecute, promote and defend British imperialistic interests in Nigeria” (p. 164).

Worthy of note is the fact that imperial policing orientations and preoccupations have been maintained and strengthened by postcolonial governments in Nigeria. Alemika (1988) has explained that despite formal independence, the political and economic conditions of exploitation, oppression, and gross power and economic injustices that gave rise to colonial policing policies have not been discarded. In other words, the nationalists against whom police terror and violence were used by the colonialists, and to whom power was subsequently transferred at independence, cushioned themselves into employing the same police brutality and terror against their opponents in post-independence political power struggles.

No sooner was the police force established and the rudiments of a judicial bureaucracy set in motion than the Armed Hausa Police were employed in a series of government atrocities. In August 1864, for example, in addition to burning down Ajido village, sixty constables shot and killed Chief Hunkain Abujoko of Ajido on charges of armed robbery and violence. In April 1865, 118 constables along with eighteen marines from HMS Investigator and HMS Handy (gun boats) attacked the Egba force who besieged Ikorodu, which the British considered a “friendly town.” In August 1865, sixty-two constables were used to attack Edinmo village for disturbing the peace of the neighborhood (Ahire, 1991; Tamuno, 1970). Again, on 18 March 1892, five hundred constables of the Armed Hausa Police, together with a detachment of the Gold Coast Hausas of the Second West Indian Regiment, and seven special-service officers from England, attacked and defeated Ijebu. The British victory over Ijebu led to peace treaties with towns such as Abeokuta, Ife, Oyo, Ibadan, and the subsequent declaration of protectorate over the whole of Yorubaland (Ahire, 1991; Crowder, 1968).

While the greater proportion of the police concentrated on military escapades in the Lagos hinterland, Governor Freeman ensured that a small section of the Armed Hausa Police was designated as “civil police” and were assigned courtroom and guard duties. From the late 1860s, under Captain John Hawley Glover (Freeman’s successor as governor), some communities were allowed to choose one or two constables as “country police” or district police. Their duties were to patrol the outlying areas.

By 1895 and owing to the completion of the “pacification” of Lagos, Police Ordinance No. 10 of 1895, dated 27 December, was passed. This ordinance established a civil police force called the Lagos Police as a body distinct from the constabulary. In 1901 the constabulary was absorbed into the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), thereby leaving the Lagos Police (civil police) as the sole police force in Lagos (Ahire, 1991; Tamuno, 1970). The new civil police were comprised of a commissioner, two assistant commissioners, one superintendent, one assistant superintendent, one pay- and quartermaster, one sergeant major, eight sergeants, eight corporals, fifty first-class “privates” and one master tailor (Tamuno, 1970).

In this book we regard December 1895 as the year when the Nigerian Police was civilianized, forming the basis for the professionalization of the force. Not only was the military constabulary replaced, but then acting Governor George Denton replaced the “Hausa boys” with indigenous Yoruba recruits. In his speech before this radical move, Denton observed: “In our Hausa Force we have a body of men dissociated from the countries immediately around Lagos both by birth and religion, and who are as a matter of fact the hereditary enemies of the Yorubas. This is such an enormous advantage in any interior complication that I should be sorry to see it abandoned if it be possible to obtain a supply of recruits in any other way” (Tamuno, 1970: 28).

In spite of their shortcomings, the new civil police had goals and clearly delineated duties. By further Police Ordinance No. 14 of 1897, the Lagos Police Force was to become “an armed force.” Its general duties included “the prevention and detection of crime, the repression of internal disturbance, and the defense of the Colony and protection against external aggression.” The ordinance further increased the force strength to include an armorer and replaced the title of “private” with “constable” (Tamuno, 1970). Although this change was mainly bureaucratic, as most Yoruba-speaking members of the constabulary were absorbed into the new “all indigenous” force, its principle was a milestone in the development of the police in Nigeria. It was also obvious that the military complexion of the constabulary was present in the new force.

Qualifications and Training

Alemika (1988) has charged that the traditions of civility, efficiency, and submission to the rule of law that constituted the bedrock of the British police system were not emphasized in the establishment or running of colonial police forces in Nigeria. On the contrary, he has argued that law-and-order maintenance and riot suppression functions of the police were emphasized to the exclusion of social services. In the Lagos Police the qualifications for the officer cadre, like those of the assistant commissioner of police until 1897, were “a sound knowledge of drill” in addition to a “clear practical knowledge of criminal law as well as a sober judgment and great personal energy” (Tamuno, 1970: 29). With the exception of a few officers attached to the force who had previous professional police experience in criminal investigation, past service in the military seemed to be the main criterion.

In the basic training, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) mode of training was adopted, and most of the early officers sent for training abroad went to Dublin. Ahire (1991) has pointed out that the RIC connection with the Nigerian Police was based on the preplanned colonial intent for the type of government Britain wished to establish in Nigeria. In effect, the Colonial Office had decided on one similar to the one in Ireland where the immigrant Protestant Anglican gentry, supported by their home government in England, had established dominance over the predominantly Catholic Irish peasants. The RIC there was a force designed to control any opposition to obnoxious laws passed to protect the seizure of political power by a nonindigenous class in order to perpetuate the economic exploitation of the indigenous people.

According to Ahire (1991):

The RIC was a paramilitary organization, renowned for its partisanship and brutality. It was well trained in military drills and the use of firearms, and was placed under the centralized control of an Inspector-General for easy mobilization. It was conferred with immense powers by broad and discretionary legal provisions. The Special Powers Act of 1922 authorized the RIC and troops to arrest, question, search, detain and intern without the due process of law… The adoption of special powers and emergency provisions in place of the rule of law is another feature which Ireland shared with colonial Nigeria (p. 55).

On the aspect of further training, the colonial government fared abysmally poor in rating. Other than three batches of Lagos Police sent for training in Dublin or Belfast in 1895, 1898, and 1899, no further encouragement was given to training overseas. Altogether only nine officers of the Lagos Police Force were sent for overseas training. In a letter abolishing provision of overseas training for African officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in 1899, Governor William MacGregor maintained that the overseas training policy amounted to a waste of time and money. He stated [to the Colonial Office]: “Several men and officers have been trained in England in order that they should teach others here. They have not done so [sic] generally the men sent come back spoiled, proud and above their work and position. I have therefore no intention of continuing this system save in very special cases unless you are of contrary opinion” (Colonial Sectretary’s Office, CSO 1.1.27, 1899).In 1898, a separate detective branch was opened up under the initiative of Assistant Police Commissioner J.F. Carroll. An assistant superintendent, F. Colley Green, became the first African to head the new department. Though very resourceful, his department was handicapped by the lack of a professionally trained detective. In his criticism of the department, Carroll wrote:

Our Detectives are not good investigators. They are all men of some service who have been selected through having shown aptitude in the past, and are naturally shrewd, have a wide knowledge of local criminals… As burglar catchers they are almost equal to any police officers I have ever known… but were I to send them… to inquire into a case of murder, I would do so without confidence. They would be without local knowledge which is in Lagos their strong point (Colonial Secretary’s Office, CSO 1.1.21, 1898).

The relevance of this statement is to show that the colonial officials understood the importance of training and professionalism, especially in the detective branch, yet they would not send anyone for the much-needed training. It would amount to depriving them of the profit they made through exploitation.

In 1891 the “Night Water Police” were established to patrol the Lagos/Dahomey (now Republic of Benin) frontier to control liquor smuggling along the border. In 1899, some sixteen more people were added to the strength of the Lagos Police Force to form the nucleus of the Railway Police section of the force. Other than these new departmental additions, not much was achieved in the era of MacGregor in Lagos due to his stoppage of the much-needed overseas training to enhance the standards of the force (Tamuno, 1970).

Police Developments in the Oil Rivers/Niger Coast Protectorates

Ahire (1991) has argued that the circumstances under which a police force was established in Oil Rivers Protectorate were similar to those noted in Lagos. Here, as in Lagos, the police force was organized as a buffer against the existing indigenous interference with coastal commerce. The end result was the imposition and spread of British colonial authority.

As noted, the Industrial Revolution created a desire on the part of European merchants to come to Africa in search of raw materials to feed their industries at home. Additionally, the official proscription of the slave trade forced Britain to place its navy on the waters along the African coast to enforce the ban on this trade in humans. Hand in hand with the naval squadron came European merchants who swarmed over Africa in a desperate attempt to establish “legitimate” trade (then in palm oil).

In 1827 the British acquired from Spain the right to use Fernando Po (now Equatorial Guinea) as a naval base and appointed Colonel Edward Nicolls as its first governor. This governor was charged with the onerous duty of negotiating treaties with the potentates of the Bights of Benin and Biafra as a means of exterminating the slave trade (Anene, 1966). This was the policy of gradual penetration.

Nicolls was succeeded by Captain W. Owen as the governor of Fernando Po. Like his predecessor, he continued in his dealings with the chiefs along the Nigerian coast, and in 1839 secured the first “slave trade” treaty between Britain and Bonny. At this point it might be fair to argue that the role of the British government in the affairs of the Nigerian coast was that of an impartial guardian solely interested in exterminating the slave trade and replacing it with “legitimate trade” (Anene, 1966). Without formal declaration, three principal forces were now in action in the coastal region of what would later become known as Nigeria.

The first force was the coastal chiefs and traders who sold people to be enslaved and were now making a transition into legitimate trade. The second force was the British traders who were willing to employ all kinds of commercial machinations to rake in huge profits. The third force in the equation was the British government, whose foreign secretary Henry John Temple (3rd Viscount Palmerston) by now had no doubt in his mind that the best way of securing and preserving wealth [from Africa] was the power to enforce the paxBritannica (Anene, 1966). It was a paradox that the relationships among these strange bedfellows shaped the future of Nigeria.

With time the interest and trade of the British merchants began to become entrenched. Furthermore, they began pleading to the home government for protection against “mushroom kings” (seen as puffed up with self-importance but lacking genuine royalty). According to the British foreign secretary, “it is the business of Government to open and secure the roads for the merchant” (Anene, 1966, p. 29). It was on the basis of this belief, and to advance British commercial and political interests, that a formal consulate was established on the island of Fernando Po, and John Beecroft was appointed consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1849 (Ahire, 1991; Anene, 1966). In 1872, the headquarters of the consulate was moved to Old Calabar in what is now Nigeria.

In the Niger Delta, the commercial rivalry among the indigenous potentates for trade on the one hand, and between the Nigerian merchants and European merchants on the other, created a fertile ground for the consolidation of British influence and extension of colonial authority. Tamuno (1970) has argued that the role of the British-inspired police forces in Nigeria were shaped by the nature of European interests in the country and the reactions of the indigenous people to their activities. Put another way, Ahire (1991) contended that the struggles between indigenous states and British imperial forces for commercial and political dominance provided the context within which the police force emerged in this area.

In order to understand this dynamic, a closer observation of this area is necessary. The delta region was occupied by a number of indigenous states—Itsekiri, Ijaw, Bonny, Kalabari, Efik, and Ibibio (Ahire, 1991). Most of these indigenous states’ political organizations had no centralized authority structure. Each of the states was located on the estuary of a river, and each took advantage of the trade that flowed on these creeks. Each of the states was also strategically located to play the middleman role in the hinterland trade with the Europeans. The House system in the region also meant that commercial preeminence was dictated by wealth and success, as successful states or Houses could politically absorb and subordinate the unsuccessful ones (Ahire, 1991; Dike, 1956; Ikime, 1968a, 1969, 1972; Jones, 1963).

This chaotic state of affairs gave British merchants and the colonial government an excuse to intervene. In the early 1850s the merchants began taking sides with rival chiefs, encouraging them to attack one another. The effect of this rivalry was to paralyze the indigenous leadership, opening the way for the British to assert their own authority over commerce in the area (Ahire, 1991). Subsequently, the coastal merchants took away the authority of the indigenous chiefs and established the first Court of Equity to regulate trade in 1854. The Court of Equity thus came into being entirely on the initiative of the European and African merchants, the latter being mainly the kings and chiefs of the communities concerned, and often heads of Houses (Afigbo, 1972).

There is no doubt that John Beecroft capitalized on the contentious state of affairs to strengthen his position as consul. His political activities were, in the words of Dike (1956: 130), “guided by general principles.” Nigerian kings who favored the abolition of slavery, embraced Christianity, encouraged “legitimate commerce,” and supported missionary enterprise were good kings. Those who stood for the old status quo and resisted encroachment, whether they dealt in slaves or not, were to him enemies of “progress” and “civilization” and were singled out for attack. This philosophy, coupled with the deterioration of indigenous political authority in the area, emboldened Beecroft to exile Bonny’s King William Dappa Pepple in 1854 (Ahire 1991; Anene, 1966).

Tamuno (1970) pointed out that in the preceding centuries, British and other European traders had relied on the protection provided by the West African chiefs who controlled the various precolonial law enforcement agencies. Concerning this golden era, Afigbo (1972: 37–38) wrote: “In the palmy days of the city-states of the Oil Rivers their indigenous political system had been able to cope with the problem of maintaining law and order both among their own people and between the latter and the trading community of Europeans.” With the local authority in disarray, a power vacuum was created that the Court of Equity could not fully fill. The establishment of a consular police force to “maintain order” was, therefore, seen to be not only necessary but justified.

Annesley’s Police (1890–1891)

With the abolition of the slave trade, the new emphasis on “legitimate commerce,” and the European race into Africa to procure raw materials and open markets for European manufactured goods, created new points of contact between Africans and European merchants. With the advent of expanded trade came the Christian missionaries. These new developments entailed not only points of contact, but also new areas of friction between the groups, and hence raised serious police problems.

Upon his appointment as consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra, John Beecroft was charged with two specific roles (Tamuno, 1970). The first instruction was for him “to prevent quarrels and misunderstandings between the African chiefs and British merchants in this area.” Second, he was “to promote ‘legitimate trade’ and discourage slave dealing” (2). Of course, he did his best, using the British gunboats of the Naval Squadron as his police force.

Beecroft was later replaced by Consul George Hartley, who was subsequently instructed (in August 1873) to “maintain peace among the native tribes and to develop the trade and resources of the country” (Tamuno, 1970: 2). To meet this demand from the Foreign Office, Hartley requested the authorization of £50,000–£60,000 a year to raise a local constabulary force. This demand was not met before his relief, acting Consul Henry Hamilton Johnston, clashed with King Jaja of Opobo in 1887. The Jaja episode and other similar frictions tilted the scales in favor of the consuls regarding their urgent need for a police force to protect European merchants. This proposal was, however, still under consideration when George Annesley became the consul of the Oil Rivers.

It is important to note that in spite of the early halfhearted efforts on the part of the Foreign Office to commit resources to Nigeria, the rapid expansion of British commercial interests in this part of the world was, by 1878, beginning to dictate the pace of British involvement in the affairs of the region. By this date, four British companies were operating in full force in the Niger valley. They were the West African Company (Manchester), Messrs Alexander Miller Brothers and Company (Glasgow), the Central African Trading Company (London), and James Pinnock and Company (Liverpool). These were in addition to several other small firms and individuals running private trade (Dike, 1956). Their presence would explain the need for the government provision of armed security and police concerns of the merchants.

In March 1890, and without waiting for approval from the Foreign Office, Annesley quickly raised the first police force in the Oil Rivers Protectorate (Tamuno, 1970). He described it as a small police force and armed the force with short guns. In his explanation to the Colonial Office, Annesley maintained that his action was necessary “to prevent any possible atrocities by the natives” (Ahire, 1991: 38; Tamuno, 1970: 4). In addition to this force of twenty men and one sergeant, Annesley also urged the establishment of a Consular Constabulary of two hundred men. This request was pending in the Foreign Office when the administration of the Oil Rivers Protectorate was entrusted to Claude MacDonald in 1891 (Tamuno, 1970).

On assuming office, MacDonald disbanded Annesley’s police, which had been charged with the worst atrocities in the history of the coastal states and had thus been dubbed “Annesley and his forty thieves.” With the help of his deputy, Ralph D. Moor, a small force of Hausas and Yorubas known as the Oil Rivers Irregulars, and a quasi-police force called Court Messengers were enlisted (Tamuno, 1970). In 1892 the Oil Rivers Irregulars had a total strength of 165 men and were a disciplined force armed with Snider carbines, the breach loading rifles invented by an American, Jacob Snider, and adopted by the British army in 1866.

The Court Messengers consisted of one sergeant, six corporals, one lance corporal, and eighteen men. By 1898 their strength had increased to 123. They were posted to various consular courts within the protectorate and performed the duties of a military police force and executed orders of the courts. Their other duties included arresting and escorting prisoners and providing protection for vice consuls as needed. Each of the detachments was supervised by a vice consul from one of the Courts of Residence (Tamuno, 1970).

In 1893 the Oil Rivers Protectorate was renamed the Niger Coast Protectorate with the addition of new territories fraudulently acquired and MacDonald was the consular general (Tamuno, 1970). In 1894 the strength of the police force was increased to 450, and by 1898 it had grown to 497 men (Ahire, 1991; Tamuno, 1970). From 1894 on, the official title of this force was the Niger Coast Protectorate Constabulary.

MacDonald, and later Moor, frequently interchanged the roles of this force between police and military. As a military force, the personnel were used to arrest or punish offending chiefs and their people. Therefore, although a police force was established for the maintenance of peace and order, it was their role as a military force that was emphasized. Tamuno (1970) must have had this practice in mind: “In seeking to maintain law and order in the Niger Coast Protectorate during the late 19th century, the government relied more on military patrols and punitive expeditions than on any civil police” (9). This protectorate constabulary, modeled on the Hausa Constabulary, existed for six years and featured prominently in the British expedition to Benin in 1896 (Nigeria Police, 1981).

In 1900 the Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria were proclaimed by the British government following the revocation of the charter of the Royal Niger Company in 1899. In the South, the Lagos Police Force and part of the Niger Coast Constabulary became the Southern Nigeria Police Force in 1906, while the bulk of the Niger Coast Constabulary formed the Southern Nigeria Regiment. In addition to their normal duties, the new police forces were responsible for dealing with internal disturbances and external aggression, albeit [and intimidation of political opponents] (Nigeria Police, 1981).

Ahire (1991) has suggested that the police force emerged in the Niger Delta within the context of the growth and consolidation of British colonial authority. This force and other militia also played a crucial role in pacifying indigenous resistance in order to make room for the activities of British merchants and missionaries and the establishment of the local colonial state. In Ahire’s opinion the police force (as established by the British) was not a better administrative machinery to maintain law and order in the Niger Coast protectorate but was instead “an instrument of colonial expansion which acted militarily to overthrow indigenous political authority” (39).

Police Development in Northern Nigeria

In Northern Nigeria the development of the police was rather peculiar in nature. The Royal Niger Company, which was granted a royal charter in 1886 by the British government, set up the Royal Niger Constabulary in 1888 with headquarters in Lokoja to protect the company’s installations along the banks of the River Niger (Nigeria Police, 1981). In his inheritance of the fortunes of the RNC, Frederick Lugard (who was the Northern Nigeria high commissioner) also inherited the company’s paramilitary and police duties. From this force Lugard picked fifty men whom he used to form the nucleus of a civil police force. The rest were disbanded and incorporated into the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) (Ahire, 1991; Tamuno, 1970).

The Royal Niger Company constabulary at its formation in 1886 consisted of five officers, two African noncommissioned officers (Non Commissioned Officers), and 413 privates. In 1898, shortly before the RNC’s charter was revoked, the force had eighteen officers and NCOs and one thousand privates. Lugard merged this force with the WAFF, which, he informed the colonial office, was needed for “preserving order throughout the Protectorate” (Ahire, 1991, p. 40).

By 1902 Lugard had increased the strength of his civil police wing from the initial fifty to 150, and by 1906 the force had thirty officers and 1,180 men. In 1906 this police force was reorganized and redesignated the Northern Nigeria Constabulary. This constabulary was not just a police force but, in the words of Lugard himself, a “backup militia or a reserve unit of the WAFF” (Ahire, 1991: 40). In the same year the duties of this police force were clearly spelled out to include [but were not limited to]: “Investigating and detecting crime, escorting Residents and other officials; prosecuting offenders; escorting prisoners; guarding gaols [jails] and prisoners at work outside the precincts of the prisons; serving summonses and executing warrants; patrolling, aiding and protecting revenue and customs officials; guarding and escorting goods; and suppressing slave raiding” (Ahire, 1991: 40).

Ahire (1991) gave a clear picture of the role of “Lugard’s Police”: “It can be said that while the WAFF undertook the conquest of the Northern emirates the constabulary followed closely behind, and generally helping to consolidate the conquest” (40). He continued: “Provinces and districts were carved out under Residents and district officers respectively. With the coercive backing of the constabulary, these officers began the task of reorganizing the social formation to be ‘self-financing’ and ‘self-governing’” (41).

Two years later, in 1908, Lugard reorganized his Northern Nigeria Constabulary for two main reasons, with far-reaching implications for policing in this region. First, Lugard recognized and acknowledged the existence within the indigenous society of an alternative and viable police force. Second, he needed and introduced adjustments in the formal organization of colonial policing in order to take advantage of this alternative police force (Ahire, 1991). Subsequent to this reorganization the constabulary was redesignated the Northern Nigeria Police. Furthermore, the recognition of this alternative police system led to the establishment of “native” institutions, including the Native Administration (NA) police forces to conduct Indirect Rule (Ahire, 1991).

After the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914, both police forces continued to operate separately. On 1 April 1930, they were merged to form the present Nigeria Police Force with headquarters in Lagos. This unified force was placed under the command of an inspector general of police (Nigeria Police, 1981).

Police Professionalization

Overview

It has been established that the history of policing dates to England, where the first modern metropolitan police force was created in 1829 to take over the role of security constables (Critchley, 1967; Hart, 1951). The purpose then was purely to order maintenance and control crime in the emergent large cities swelled by the “gains” of the Industrial Revolution. There are various types of police, for example, the city police, county sheriffs, state troopers, federal police, and, in places like Nigeria, the national police and the Native Authority Police. The nature and method of organization depend on the social and economic needs of each country.

In the United States (unlike in England), the Texas Rangers, formed in 1836, were an organization designed to fight as a quasi-military unit maintained primarily for the protection of a predominantly rural environment (Holden, 1986). Though a formal city police force was created in New York in 1844 with eight hundred officers (and later in other cities), the order-maintenance aim was partially to combat the growing militancy of the labor movement (Lynch and Groves, 1989; Nalla and Newman, 1990). The order-maintenance function of the police, therefore, has long been expected and accepted. Added to the maintenance of order are other functions such as law enforcement, providing emergency services, and crime prevention and control.

In Nigeria the police were initially organized to intimidate and subjugate the “natives,” and thereby enhance exploitation and servicing the capitalist needs of colonialism. The previous section traced the origin and development of the Nigerian police, showing the various stages of their transition toward professionalism. It is essential to note that the process was gradual, spanning more than five decades. This section will present a discussion of police professionalization in general and its lasting impact on the present Nigerian Police Force in particular.

Just as the concept of maintaining a police force originated in England, efforts toward improvement and professionalization also began in England, specifically dating back to the efforts of the Fielding brothers (Henry and John) in 1748 and 1754, respectively. Later, in 1829, Robert Peel succeeded in persuading the English Parliament to pass the legislation that marked the beginning of the modern police. The purpose of this transformation was to provide a more efficient service.

From the onset it can be inferred that education and training constitute the bulk of the remedy for the problem of professionalization. While the entry-level qualification in Britain has varied from a high school diploma to a four-year college degree, in the United States a minimum requirement of a two-year college diploma is fast becoming the norm. In fact, various agencies and commissions, particularly the federal police agencies, have been insisting on a baccalaureate degree as a minimum requirement for entry into the service. According to some sociologists (Bressler, 1967; Saunders, 1970), university education provides ethical and moral indoctrination that legitimizes existing power arrangements and reinforces appropriate attitudes for sustenance of democratic institutions and peaceful coexistence of diverse population groups. To Bressler, education serves as “a constituent element in all scientific, professional, and managerial training and as such is presumably directly instrumental in enhancing occupational competencies. In one sense general education is the most efficient form of occupational training. Rapid change is hostile to narrow expertise and a curriculum that emphasizes breadth and flexibility may better equip students to meet unpredictable vocational demands (50). Saunders agreed that these functions are especially relevant in the case of the police, “who bear a unique responsibility for maintaining democratic institutions” and for “assuring the peaceful coexistence of diverse population groups.” Furthermore, police work is obviously susceptible to “unpredictable vocational demands” (82).

In Nigeria applicants can join the police force at three levels: the constable, the cadet inspector, and the cadet assistant superintendent cadres. Candidates for cadet assistant superintendent are required to have a four-year university degree. Candidates for the cadet inspector level are expected to have the minimum qualification of the general certificate of education, ordinary level, or high school diploma, with passes in at least four subjects including English and math. Candidates for recruit constables are required to meet a lower standard of education (Nigeria Police, 1981).

Although Nigeria is the focus of this discussion, police professionalization in Great Britain and the United States has been discussed briefly to draw attention to the trend toward the improvement of the police in the latter two countries. This no doubt may shed some light on the evaluation of the nature of colonial police and efforts toward improvement of the well-being of Nigerian police officers vis-a-vis their “establishment to enforce colonial repressive law, order, ‘peace,’ and to protect British ‘honour and interest,’ and to ensure by ruthless means if necessary that the various taxes imposed on the poor and oppressed colonized peoples were collected” (Alemika, 1988: 166).

Professionalization During the Colonial Era

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Advisory Committee in 1965 confirmed the widely held belief that further education, quality training, and refresher courses are the hallmarks of an efficient police force. They stated: “Generally, it is conceded that today’s law enforcement officer has a need for higher education. It is also generally agreed that within the next few years law enforcement officers will find higher education imperative… The law enforcement officer is required to meet all kinds of people and innumerable kinds of situations (Saunders, 1970: 83). Based on this observation the committee believed that good education and improved training are prerequisites for the officer to:

(a) be equipped to make good value judgments;
(b) be able to maintain his perspective;
(c) be able to understand the underlying causes of human behavior;
(d) be able to communicate clearly and precisely;
(e) possess leadership qualities;
(f) be knowledgeable of skills;
(g) be able to understand the criminal code and know when a criminal offense has in fact been committed; and
(h) know his position in the total framework of society, the rights as well as the obligations of the citizenry, and the dignity of man.

The Lagos Police

In Lagos, Police Ordinance No. 10 of 1895, dated 27 December 1895, established the Lagos Police as a civil police force (Tamuno, 1970). Two years later Police Ordinance No. 14 of 1897 declared the Lagos Police Force to be “an armed force.” Its broad general duties included the prevention and detection of crime, the repression of internal disturbance, defense of the colony, and protection against external aggression (Tamuno, 1970).

Although the sole purpose for the establishment of this force (independent of the armed constabulary) was to civilianize the personnel and make it citizen friendly, the change was in practice cosmetic and bureaucratic. Most of the rank and file were former members of the largely military constabulary. Its first commissioner (or commander), Captain J. D. Hamilton, was a military officer who attended a course of instruction in civil police work at Scotland Yard and the Royal Irish Constabulary. His successor, Captain W. R. Reeve-Tucker, was also a former military officer without any police training. These facts serve to illustrate that the tone expected of the new police force must invariably reflect that of its officers. In this case it was militaristic.

Until 1897 the stipulated qualification for assistant commissioners of police in Lagos was “a sound knowledge of drill” rather than previous experience in police duties. Other qualifications were a clear and practical knowledge of criminal law, as well as a sober judgment and great personal energy (Tamuno, 1970). Between 1895 and 1899 overseas training for African officers of the Lagos Police was implemented before being stopped by Governor MacGregor after only two commissioned officers and six NCOs received overseas training by then. That put an end to the professional training of Nigerian colonial officers for a while. Professional training resumed when indigenous police training colleges were opened up in Lagos in 1921, in Kaduna in 1922, in Enugu in 1932, and in Maiduguri in 1973 (Tamuno, 1970: 59; Nigeria Police, 1981).

Another area where some effort was made at professionalization was in the police detective service. In the 1870s the first six detectives were appointed by Alfred Moloney. In 1896 Assistant Police Commissioner Carroll urged the establishment of a Detective Department on a more efficient basis. Although this department performed wonderfully well under Assistant Superintendent F. Colley Green, the lack of overseas specialized training and limited resources in skill and equipment hampered operations to its full potential (Tamuno, 1970).

In appointment to the officer cadre of the colonial police, the British held a monopolized preserve. Ahire (1991) observed that appointments were made either from the police forces of other British colonies, other departments of the Colonial Civil Service in Nigeria, or from the Armed and Civil Services of the United Kingdom. The officer corps of all the British colonial police was under a unified system whereby officers were freely transferred from one force to another, albeit to ensure that openings were not filled up with qualified Nigerians.

The Annual Report on the Police Force for 1936 showed that all the forty senior officers appointed to the police in Nigeria between 1926 and 1936 came from either a nonpolice department in the United Kingdom or from among police service officers of other overseas British colonies. Conspicuously significant was the fact that not even a single police officer was transferred from the British police. This policy was based on the fallacious assumption that the training and orientation of the British police was unsuitable for service in the colonies (Ahire, 1991). The only appointees who came directly from Britain were men with a military training background in the armed forces or ex-officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) (Ahire, 1991).

It has been pointed out (Ahire, 1991; Tamuno, 1970) that the major reason the colonial government favored RIC training and ex-military officers was because the RIC program provided at that time the best training for the conditions expected in the British dependencies overseas. Historically the RIC training had been adapted to the conditions in Ireland which, according to Tamuno (1970: 45), had a “heritage of rebellion and opposition to British rule for many centuries” (45). In anticipation of similar opposition from the colonies, the RIC course was recommended for the police in the colonies.

Ahire (1991) has earlier argued that the raison d’être for the establishment of the police was to intimidate or “pacify the large number of very backward pagans who were in persistent defiance of colonial authority” (41). For the same reason he argued that “it is not very hard to appreciate why training in Ireland was deemed essential for all Nigerian colonial police officers” (55). The inherent contradiction in the colonial policy justified the exploitation charges heaped on colonial motives. For example, William MacGregor, George Chardin Denton, and Harry Johnstone in succession discouraged the training of Nigerian officers overseas as it “amounted to a waste of time and money” (Tamuno, 1970: 32). At the same time MacGregor and Johnstone specifically requested two European assistant commissioners of police with RIC training background and experience (Tamuno, 1970).

In fact, the Colonial Office’s discrimination policy was very overt. It flatly denied Nigerian officers any overseas training that would help in the process of professionalization. On the other hand, in a circular letter dated September 1907, the British secretary of state for the colonies made training at the RIC Depot, Dublin, compulsory for British police officers in the police establishment of the British West Indies and of East and West Africa (Tamuno, 1970).

The Southern Nigeria Police Force

Until the 1900s nothing was done in the protectorate of Southern Nigeria in the direction of consolidating the police force or offering further training. In fact, the relative peace that obtained in the Yoruba hinterland after 1893, and the iron-fisted control maintained by the Royal Niger Company’s armed brigands in the Eastern states, gave Ralph Moor enough peace not to bother with rushing for police reorganization. For nearly two years after taking control over the area from the RNC, Moor had a force of only forty civil police or Niger District Police he had inherited from the RNC, in addition to the corps of Court Messengers whom he used as guards and escorts.

In reality Moor delayed a full-scale police reorganization in the Southern protectorate to enable completion of the already-planned military expedition against the slave-trading people of Arochukwu (known as ndi Aro or Aros) and their opposition to British penetration into Igbo hinterland markets. So, while Moor favored the establishment of a civil police force in principle, this had to wait till the end of the Aro expedition, which began in November 1901 and was over nearly as soon as it started.

In his Police Proclamation (No. 4 of 1902) released on 26 February 1902, Moor set out his police reorganization plan with the title of “Southern Nigeria Police.” It was to be headed by a British inspector assisted by British and African officers. The status, powers, functions, discipline, and privileges of the Southern Nigeria Police were, according to Tamuno (1970), similar to those of the Lagos Police.

The new head of the command was former Lieutenant J. L. R. Parry, who had a previous military record in Canada and Southern Nigeria but, was without any police experience. Between 1904 and 1905, Parry was assisted by two British assistant inspectors and three African assistant inspectors. As in the Lagos Police, discrimination was practiced regarding the salaries and status of the British and African assistant inspectors, despite similarities in their titles and qualifications (Tamuno, 1970).

In 1906 the Lagos Police and the Southern Nigeria Police were amalgamated into the Southern Nigeria Police Force. Johnstone, the former commissioner of the Lagos Police, became its head with the title of inspector general, and Parry, the former head of the Southern Nigeria Police, became the deputy inspector general in 1908. As of December 1906, the nine British personnel in the force were of gazetted ranks, while the bulk of the 1,043 African members of the force were of lower ranks. Of these men, 555 were Yoruba, 393 Igbo, sixty Bini, sixteen Ijaw, nine Itsekiri, and five each of Hausa and Kroomen (Colonial Secretary’s Office, CSO 1.15.11, 17 March 1907).

The 1906 amalgamation ushered in only two changes. The first was the unification of the command structure. The second was the increase in police establishments to cope with the vast area to be patrolled. Other than these, there was no spectacular change since the role of the police continued to be the performance of semimilitary duties.

In the area of professional and personal well-being, available evidence (Tamuno, 1970) indicates that the “color bar syndrome” that infected the Lagos Police caught up with the new Southern Nigeria Police Force as well. This is hardly surprising given that the new head was the former boss of the Lagos Police. Accordingly, the “color bar and racial discrimination played a large part in limiting the opportunities of competent African police officers during the first four decades of the present century” (48).

For the NCOs and lower ranks, the existing facilities for their training continued to be inadequate. With overseas training scrapped, the emphasis had been on local in-service training geared toward drill, the prevention and detection of crime, and general police duties. After May 1906, the only achievement of the force was its compilation and publication of the “Constables’ Catechism,” which summarized (for the benefit of literate policemen) the general police duties and the most common offenses in the combined territories, the colony of Lagos and protectorate of Southern Nigeria (Ahire, 1991; Alemika, 1988; Tamuno, 1970). At about this same time, the eight British police officers in the Southern Nigeria Police Force attended the obligatory RIC course in Ireland at the expense of Nigerian Police funds (Tamuno, 1970).

Northern Nigeria Police

The declaration of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate in 1900 by Frederick Lugard marked the beginning of effective British occupation of the region. Between 1900 and 1903, Lugard had completed the conquest of the whole region and then turned to the delegation of police and political powers in the region under the system of indirect administration.

However, the peculiar nature of Northern Nigeria always necessitated a dual form of government—one state and the other traditional. Similarly, the police system in the colonial era reflected this division for administrative convenience. That is, the Hausa-Fulani emirs were allowed considerable control over their local police, the Dogarai, in their respective areas of jurisdiction.

For a start, Lugard took fifty men from the Royal Niger Company Constabulary to form the nucleus of the civil police under his new protectorate administration. He appointed J. F. Carroll as his first head of Civil Police and Prisons in 1900. Upon the sudden death of Carroll in the same year, Lugard appointed Albert L. de Morley Mynn as the new police commissioner. Mynn served in this position until 1903, when he was replaced by Major A. Bain of the Royal Engineers.

A year after the establishment of the civil police, Lugard increased its strength to one hundred. By 1902 a further increase put the total police strength at 150 men. In addition, he established an armed constabulary force of twenty-nine officers and one thousand NCOs and constables in 1903. As in the Southern protectorate, all officers of the new constabulary were required to take the RIC course before or after appointment in the force (Tamuno, 1970).

Between 1903 and 1908, the Northern Nigeria Constabulary went through a series of internal reorganizations. Part of the reorganization was the delegation to the traditional emirs the power to police their own respective areas. Through official encouragement of the local police, the Dogarai, the administration hoped to reduce the expenditure on the British-created police. In this manner Lugard laid the foundation of what later became known as the Local Authority Police, which the emirs used to enforce local laws and collect taxes imposed by the government.

As of December 1908, the total African manpower of the Northern Nigeria Constabulary consisted of 240 Hausas, 216 Yorubas, 102 Beriberis, fifty-three Fulanis, and twenty-five Nupes. There were also fifty-four other members of the force whose ethnic origins were not determined. Other changes in 1908 included the changing of the title of the head of the force from commissioner to inspector general as of 1 April 1908. Furthermore, the title of the force itself was changed from Northern Nigeria Constabulary to Northern Nigeria Police.

In his speech at Sokoto on 21 March 1903 during the installation of a new sultan (after the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate), Lugard set the tone of his new government. He expressed his intention to use the existing feudal social arrangements to impose his own brand of tyranny on Northern Nigeria. In the speech he declared: “The Fulani in the old times under Dan Fodio conquered this country. They took the right to rule over it, to levy taxes, to depose Kings and to create Kings. They in turn have by defeat lost their rule which has come into the hands of the British. All these things which I have said the Fulani by conquest took the right to do now pass to the British” (Kirk-Greene, 1965: 43).

The exploitative imperialist agenda of Lugard is unmistakable. By declaring Northern Nigeria a British property by right of conquest, Ahire (1991) argued, Lugard clearly presented colonialism as a business venture with inputs and returns. The colonial police forces, asserted Alemika (1988: 165), were therefore organized and oriented to behave as occupation forces—“ruthless, brutal, corrupt, dishonest, and prone to brutalizing the colonized peoples and vandalizing their properties” (Ikime, 1977; Tamuno, 1970). The compulsory RIC training was, therefore, meant to inculcate a military style of discipline and regimentation to serve the capitalist needs of exploitation and colonialism.

1914 Amalgamation

The political amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates in 1914 brought about a central government under a governor general. The Northern and Southern Police commands were still under the inspectors general of the two respective regions. In effect, this development gave Lugard the sole authority for determining the future of policing in Nigeria.

Shortly after the amalgamation, World War I broke out. In the first exercise of his expanded authority, Lugard ordered the mobilization of the entire police force of the Southern Provinces to join the war. Four months later the forces of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria were equally mobilized to fight the Germans. In terms of professionalization, it may be argued (by British apologists) that forceful mobilization to fight another country’s war was the only successful practical intensive training offered to the Nigerian police. That the lives of these officers were neither insured by the British government, nor were the families of the dead ones compensated, is an issue that is best reserved for another day.

Nevertheless, on 26 July 1915, a new medal, the African Police Medal for Meritorious Service was introduced by the British Crown. This medal was reserved for African NCOs and other ranks who distinguished themselves in zeal and gallantry [albeit on the battlefield], but not in police work (Tamuno, 1970). The fallacy of the whole exercise was the idea that it was a waste of money to send African officers for training abroad, but a cost-effective measure to send them untrained to fight on the battlefield against professionally trained soldiers. Needless to point out, they had to fight without extra remuneration.

In August 1917 Lugard’s administration enacted Police Ordinance Cap. 32, which theoretically established the Southern Police Force for the Colony and Southern Provinces and the Northern Police Force for the Northern P: rovinces, no further practical changes took place in the institutional organization of the police until 1921 (Tamuno, 1970: 58). By that year, a police depot was opened in Obalande (Lagos) to train recruits in Lagos and the Native Authority policemen for the former Western region. A similar training school was established in Kaduna in 1922, and by 1929 the Kaduna school extended its efforts to training Native Authority Police NCOs, the Dogarai forces (Tamuno, 1970: 60; Nigeria Police, 1981).

In the same period, from 1921 to 1923, Governor Hugh Clifford implemented a housing development plan initiated by C. W. Duncan, who in 1919 became the inspector general of the Southern Police Force. The plan called for the building of residential barracks for serving police officers. By 1925 living quarters were provided for 40 percent of rank-and-file police officers in Lagos, and the remaining 60 percent received a monthly lodging or housing allowance with their pay. The barracks system was later extended to all provinces (Tamuno, 1970: 59).

The Police Reserve Training Depot was opened in Enugu in 1932, and by 1936 all recruits formerly trained at the Lagos Depot were transferred to Enugu. In all the police training depots—Kaduna, Lagos, and Enugu—the central object of police training remained the inculcation of the military style of discipline and regimentation. The Nigerian Police Standing Orders unequivocally emphasized this plural objective as reported by Ahire (1991: 57): “[E]mphasis is put on drill as the means of instilling obedience, discipline, and self-control. Officers and men are required to model their drill standards on those for the military infantry, as the force is itself a semi-military organization… It is essential that every constable should be able to use his rifle with a fair amount of accuracy, for if a man is totally unable to shoot, he is useless to the force.” Ahire further contended that there was, in fact, very little difference between police training in colonial Nigeria and that of the troops, as most of the policemen were old army men, most of whom had distinguished war service records.

The social natures of the North and the South dictated a variation in the nature of the little civil training offered the recruits in the two training depots. The Enugu Police School was required to train the police of the Southern Provinces and township (urban) police in the Northern Provinces. It was also to strive to improve their standard of English literacy. The Kaduna Police School, on the other hand, was expected to train the men required to perform the more rudimentary duties in the “primitive” areas, especially in the Northern Provinces.

Events emanating from the end of the European World War I, and colonial, social, and economic circumstances necessitated a slight modification in the training program of the training schools from the late 1920s. Some aspects of civil policing were incorporated to accommodate the social diversity and political needs of the country. This period (circa 1929) coincided with the serious series of protests against the high-handedness of the colonial apparatus: the anti-tax riots in Warri Province, 1927–1928 (Ikime, 1966); the Aba Women’s riot of 1929 (Afigbo, 1966); the Egba tax riot of 1918 (Afigbo et al., 1986); to name but a few. Overall, the invention of minute aspects of civil policing did not imply the abandonment of the paramilitary aspect of training (Ahire, 1991).

About this time, attention was being given to providing new training facilities overseas for British police officers beginning in 1921. Following the Irish Nationalist struggle after the Easter uprising of 1916, the RIC training gave way to the Royal Ulster Constabulary course at the Newtownards Depot in Northern Ireland. The British Nigerian officers were sent for courses at Newtownards, to courses of instruction for the senior dominion and colonial police officers at Scotland Yard, and the Peel House advanced courses of lectures on criminal law, methods of identification, pathology, toxicology, prison administration, traffic problems, and other subjects dealing with police duties (Tamuno, 1970: 60).

In the provincial sphere certain model but limited reforms took place. The Kaduna Intelligence Bureau expanded to combine the duties of a criminal records office with those of political intelligence from the 1920s. It ran this combined function until 1933, and later merged with the Fingerprint Bureau of the Criminal Investigation Division in Lagos (Tamuno, 1970: 61).

The Southern Police Force, meanwhile, took a number of steps toward reform and expansion. With a staff comprised of four European superintendents and ten Nigerian corporals, it opened up the Motor Traffic Section of the Southern Police Force. Their main goals were to control dangerous driving, to regulate licensing, and to discourage vehicle overloading and other related items (hence the origin of the Nigeria police acceptance of bribes at checkpoints). The Southern Police Force in 1925 also took over from the Customs Department the preventive work on the Western frontier (also the origin of the Nigeria Customs acceptance of bribes at checkpoints and border crossings). A similar function was extended to the Eastern frontier in 1928 (Tamuno, 1970: 62).

By Police Ordinance No. 25 of 1928, which amended Police Ordinance Cap. 32 of 1917, the Fire Brigade became an integral part of the Southern Police Force (hence the origin of the Nigeria Fire Service’s failure to respond to fire emergencies because of an absence of bribes). Under the same Ordinance No. 25, the inspector general of the Southern Police Force became the chief fire commissioner (Tamuno, 1970: 62). The Southern Police Force also continued to police the Nigeria Railway until the general manager of the Nigeria Railway demanded the creation of a separate railway police.

The 1930 Police Amalgamation

The amalgamation of the Southern Nigerian Police Force and the Northern Nigerian Police Force on 1 April 1930 resulted in the creation of the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) under one unified command. In reality the exercise was merely a cosmetic bureaucratic change that did not materially alter the existing powers, duties, discipline, or privileges of the policemen. The new police establishment provided for a single inspector general and a deputy inspector general. The Northern and Southern Provinces each had an assistant inspector general under whom were seventy-six commissioners and assistant commissioners, and six superintendents of police. Of course, most of the officers were British, and the rest were NCOs and other ranks (Tamuno, 1970: 63ff).

While the police amalgamation has been widely regarded as one of the most significant changes in Nigerian police history, it was really a change without substance. If anything, it led to heightened resentment of the colonial police by the emerging African elites. At the root of the resentment were the color bar and racial discriminatory policies of the colonial government that had not only banned Nigerians from overseas training, but also from promotion to the higher ranks in the force irrespective of competency and years of service.

In the administrative field, the NPF asked to be allowed to give up some odd jobs it had previously undertaken for the government. Major Alan Saunders, the inspector general (1936–1937), was the first to ask to be relieved of his ex-officio duties as the central registrar of licenses, sheriff, principal immigration officer, and inspector of weights and measures. Additionally, he requested that the Lagos Town Council be entrusted with the administration of the fire-fighting services. These extraneous services and commitments, according to him, consumed too much valuable police time (Tamuno, 1970: 125).

In 1937 Saunders relieved the NPF of responsibilities related to police-escorts for government agencies and private companies. In its place he recommended the employment of supernumerary constables. Then, in 1946, responsibility for preventive services in the Eastern and Western Provinces was transferred from NPF to the Customs and Excise Department. A similar exercise was to follow in the Northern Provinces later (Tamuno, 1970: 127).

When in the late 1940s and early 1950s public corporations like the Nigerian Railways and Nigerian Ports Authority began to assume the financial responsibility for policing their properties, the NPF was further relieved of all those encumbrances (Tamuno, 1970: 127). The police also gave up their control of motor licensing and the central Motor Registry between 1950 and 1953. The police were relieved of the responsibility to control weights and measures between 1955 and 1958. This duty was rightly transferred to the Ministry of Commerce.

Similarly, in 1960, the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs relieved the police of the burdensome responsibility for immigration and passport control, which the police had performed since 1933. Between 1964 and 1965, the registrars of the High Courts of the Federation took over the duties of sheriff from the inspector general. In effect the police ceased providing court bailiffs and ended their supervision of executions carried out by public hangmen.

In 1954, following calls made by Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1951 and A. O. Ogedengbe in 1953, the decision was made to establish the Women’s Police Branch (WPB) of the NPF. Their initial responsibilities were investigation duties with the Railway Police and at the headquarters in matters concerning offenses involving women and children. Later, much of their attention went to the establishment of juvenile welfare centers, motor traffic duties, street hawking control, and station desk duties. This early batch of female officers did not receive training in firearms and riot drill, as policewomen never participated in riot duties. By 1962 there was a total of 170 policewomen in the NPF, with only two coming from Northern Nigeria (Tamuno, 1970: 137; Nigeria Police, 1981).

Other areas where some limited development took place in the colonial era include the first-aid services rendered under the auspices of the Saint Johns Ambulance Brigade, which began in 1954. This became a full-fledged Police Medical Service in 1975. The Police Band was formed in 1920 and has since grown to include a military band. It also trained the bands of other services. The Transport Branch was founded in 1950 as the Force Transport Unit, and the following year the first Police Workshop was opened at the NPF Headquarters (Nigeria Police, 1981).

The Marine Branch, which was formed in 1891 with a sergeant and twelve men, was modified and improved between the 1930s and 1950s. Instead of the dugout canoes previously used, they became equipped with Brimabright dinghies fitted with outboard engines. In 1950 the Signals Branch of the NPF was established, but with only four walkie-talkie stations.

On balance it might be safe to acknowledge great strides made in the field of the establishment of the police as a legitimate agency of social and crime control. At the same time, the slow pace of improvement on the part of the colonial masters (who were guided primarily by their desire for profit) casts their image in “red” on the balance sheet. They must be found wanting, as they did very little too late to professionalize the NPF. This below-average performance lends some credibility to the allegations of maladministration leveled by modern researchers of the colonial economy—Tamuno (1970), Rodney (1972), Danns (1982), Alemika (1988), Ahire (1991)—and a host of others.

Alemika (1988) charged that the development of English-type police in Nigeria “reflects the piecemeal and chaotic process of colonial theft (conquests) and subordination of the precolonial nations in the territory between 1861 and 1906” (163). Since the colonial state ultimately rested on force, he argued that it relied on the police to maintain its stranglehold in spite of opposition from the colonial peoples. Tamuno (1970), Crowder (1978a), Ikime (1977), and Ahire (1991) all contend that colonial ambitions and objectives were (to varying degrees during the phase of colonialism in Nigeria) prosecuted through organized governmental violence, vandalism, and plunder on the part of the colonizers.

From their inception the Protectorate Police (later Nigerian Police) were placed under the directive of the political officers. This practice, Ahire (1991) argued, was necessary for the efficient extraction of economic surplus from producers who were not fully proletarianized, and to deal with recurrent popular protests against unpopular and perfidious colonial policies. Similarly all sundry administrative, coercive, and surveillance organs of colonialism (police, military, prisons, courts, tribunals, “native” authorities, residents, and district officers) were established and sustained to prosecute, promote, and defend British imperialistic interests in Nigeria as elsewhere in Africa (Alemika, 1988).

Britain’s security in Nigeria began with its increased involvement in the self-imposed task of protecting the lives and property of the indigenous people, the European merchants and other businessmen, and Christian missionaries. After the annexation of Lagos, the security of the colony became so difficult to maintain that McCoskry wrote the Colonial Office for permission to establish a consular guard (police of some sort). According to him, “Laws will have to be made and administered… we have no police, no jails, nor other efficient mode of punishment for offenders” (14). A force of about two hundred strong was therefore needed to give the new government “due influence in the disturbed countries” (Tamuno, 1970: 14). In the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1890, Annesley organized a small police force in order “to prevent any possible atrocities by the natives” (4).

These pretenses at moral sanctity and the claimed desire for the preservation of law and order were debunked by the nature and manner of the composition of the early constabularies. Ahire (1991), Danns (1982), and Alemika (1988) have convincingly argued that law and order maintenance and crime control were not factors in the British aims of establishing a police force in Nigeria. The same argument applies to the failure of the British to professionalize the police; thereby they created a lethargic force whose stock-in-trade was (and still is) oppression of the poor, bribery and corruption, and protection of the rich and corrupt officials.

The preference by early colonial administrators for Hausa soldiers in ethnically Yoruba Lagos colony clearly reveals the colonial motive. Alemika (1988) pointed out that gruesome law and order enforcement was sustained by the colonists through the use of divide-and-rule strategy. Under this strategy, policemen were recruited and then stationed in areas where they were alien and detested. The inevitable mutual hostility fostered by this practice sustained the colonial needs of exploitation. This grievious misstep in the foundational base of the Nigerian Police Force makes a good case today for the immediate development of community policing to help the country to recover from years lost to the proverbial pestilence of locusts, and for the citizens to experience the benefits of what Wiatrowski and Pino (2016) called “democratic policing.”

In 1863, for example, Governor Henry Freeman wrote to the duke of New Castle to elaborate on the advantages of such a skewed practice. He argued that by raising a police force for Lagos that consisted of Hausa Muslims and ex-slaves, who were usually detested by the Yoruba, it made it difficult for a rapport to develop between the police and the people of Lagos. Similarly, in 1893 Governor Denton, in a letter to the Colonial Office in London, stated: “In our Hausa Force we have a body of men dissociated from the countries [Yoruba communities] immediately around Lagos both by birth and religion, and who are as a matter of fact the hereditary enemies of the Yorubas. This is such an enormous advantage in any interior complications that I should be sorry to see it abandoned if it be possible to obtain a supply of recruits in any other way (Colonial Secretary’s Office, CSO 1.1.14, 2 August 1893).

It is obvious from these correspondences that the British had ulterior motives behind their actions. Danns (1982) asserted that the use of nonlocal recruits in colonial police forces was to emphasize that the role of the police was not to protect the community, but to execute the will of the colonial state. No wonder no effort was made to train the Nigerian officers overseas. The quasi-military training and nature of the colonial police, according to Ahire (1991), further buttresses this point.

Alemika (1988) has argued that the law and order maintenance and riot suppression functions of the police were emphasized to the exclusion of social services. In effect, therefore, the colonial police forces were organized and oriented to “behave as occupation forces—ruthless, brutal, corrupt, dishonest and prone to brutalizing the colonized peoples and vandalising their properties” (p. 165). Undoubtedly, the preoccupations of the colonial police were not the promotion and enforcement of just laws, the rule of law, natural justice and equity, and the security of the vast majority of Nigeria as colonial officials and their apologists have often claimed (Ahire, 1991; Alemika, 1988; Ikime, 1977; Tamuno, 1970).

Another reality deciphered from the nature of the colonial police was its total disregard for the sanctity of precolonial structures and social institutions. Neither was the uniqueness of precolonial societies and nations considered, nor were the distinctions among the nations and peoples considered in fashioning out the type of policing desirable for their protection. Rather, according to Ahire (1991), the police in Nigeria were used to subjugate indigenous societies and to subordinate them to the political authority of the colonial state and its interests.

In his analysis of the role of the police in development, Bayley (1969) maintained that the police should be first and foremost studiously nonviolent and should not operate across the grain of what people want them to enforce. The police also must close the gap that may grow in any society between those who enforce the law and those against whom it is enforced. They must recruit from every geographical region of the country and from every social stratum or group, and by so doing can help to create that modicum of national unity that undergirds any democratic regime. Finally, Bayley also suggested that while a national democratic government requires a growing modern economy saturated with increased specialization of functions, its police should recruit and train both men and women who will be able to fit comfortably into any technological society and who will be better able to use modern technology for policing.

1. The exaggeration by the police of evidence in court.

2. The use of unnecessary violence.

3. Fatuousness in dealing with public demonstrations [and breaking labor strikes].

4. Ineptitude in handling the public on occasions of public demonstration.

5. Incivility to members of the public.

6. Unnecessary delay in attending to complaints.

7. The lack of courtesy shown by the police in discharging such duties as traffic control, making arrests, and taking statements (218).

According to Ekpenyong (1987), in addition to the inherited colonial mentality, poor educational standards, the lack of appropriate professional qualification, the recruitment of low-skilled demobilized soldiers, and the low salary scale, which has lagged behind the national minimum, are allegedly at the root of the misdeeds of the police and consequent public antipathy toward them.

Postcolonial Police Professionalization

The political developments following the securing of independence from Britain in 1960 resulted in some significant changes in the affairs of the Nigerian police. First there was the Independence Constitution, and later the Republican Constitution of 1963. With the excision of the Southern Cameroons following the British-rigged plebiscite to have a separate government from Nigeria’s, the inspector general [of the Nigeria Police Force] from October 1961 ceased to control the NPF detachment in the Cameroons. Also, when Nigeria became a republic in 1963, the inspector general became the chief police executive of the North, East, West, and the newly created Midwest regions. A new commissioner was appointed to command the NPF in the new Midwest state (Tamuno, 1970).

It may be right to assert that the 1960 Independence and 1963 Republican developments set the pace for most of the developmental changes that took place in Nigeria. Much of the “professionalization” of the police in Nigeria also came after its 1960 independence. The NPF inherited from colonial Britain after independence was an unprofessional force inundated with junior-ranking or ungazetted officers of African descent. At independence it was a national police force and the only force operating throughout the nation, which later became the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but with a centralized police force contrary to principles of federalism.

In 2020 President Muhammadu Buhari signed the Nigerian Police Bill into law to provide a funding framework, in accordance with other federal institutions, for more training, professionalism, transparency, and police-community collaboration in crime fighting. This does not say anything that is new and may be a way for the government to dodge the intense demand for community policing.

What does a funding framework in accordance with other federal institutions mean when the police have always been funded in accordance with other federal institutions as if the country is under a unitary system of government? There are no state police and no local government police under Nigerian federalism and the police state is reluctant to allow the communities to police themselves democratically as would be the case in a true federalism. If professionalism and training mean sending Nigerian police officers to be trained in racist countries like the United States and the United Kingdom where people of African descent have led a global movement to demand the simple fact that “black lives matter,” then there is cause for alarm in Nigeria and across Africa because professionalism could coexist with the professionalization of police abuse of power.

More funding toward better remuneration for police officers to reduce bribery as a source of income is important, but funding for more military-grade weapons with which to kill more innocent people is counterproductive. However, better remuneration packages may not reduce corruption given that the politicians have some of the best remuneration packages in the world and yet they remain corrupt. More important than funding is the freedom of the cmmunmities to police themselves democratically while holding the police accountable for their vast powers.

Even if “transparency” in the Nigerian Police Force means the admission of wrongdoing and the award of huge amounts of money to victims of the abuse of human rights and the massacre of Nigerians by the colonial-style policing, there should still be room for community autonomy and democratic self-policing instead of only promising police-community collaboration in fighting crime. The government should not be afraid of supporting community policing that is autonomous from the Nigerian Police Force in a truly democratic federal system of government unless it remains neocolonial.

The Police Act 2020 provides for private investigators to be approved by the police and registered along with private investigation schools for the first time in Nigeria, in line with what is obtained in other parts of the world. But private eyes do not make community policing. The Police Act also prohibits the police from arresting people for civil disputes that are better settled through civil suits or in the community. The act provides for the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer that could be provided through free legal aid. The police commander is required to report cases of all arrestrs to the magistrates every month and detainees are given the right to bail within twenty-four hours. The police are authorized to fingerprint suspects and take their photographs but if they refuse, the police will apply to the court to compel the suspect to submit. These are normal police practices around the world but they appear to be giving more powers to the police in Nigeria instead of empowring the communities to be self-governing democratically. Still lacking is a framework for effective community policing in Nigeria

The modern NPF still maintains a monolithic and centralized management structure under the inspector general of police (IGP). The NPF Headquarters is located at the Federal Capital Territory in Abuja and serves as the operational and administrative base of the IGP. It is organized into six departments (each headed by a deputy inspector general, or DIG, of police) namely:

- A Department: Administration

- B Department: Operations (including Signals and Communications)

- C Department: Works

- D Department: Criminal Investigations

- E Department: Training

- F Department: Planning, Research, and Statistics

Up until 2020, the police command has been subdivided into twelve geographical zonal commands each headed by an assistant inspector general (AIG) for the ease of rapid deployment and operational efficiency. Five new zones were added in 2020, bringing the total number to seventeen zones:

- Zone 1: Kano, and Jigawa States, with headquarters in Kano

- Zone 2: Lagos and Ogun States, with headquarters in Lagos

- Zone 3: Adamawa, Gombe, and Taraba States with headquarters in Yola (Adamawa State)

- Zone 4: Benue, Nassarawa, and Plateau States, with headquarters in Makurdi (Benue State)

- Zone 5: Delta, and Edo States, with headquarters in Benin (Edo State)

- Zone 6: Cross River, and Akwa Ibom States, with headquarters in Calabar (Cross-River State)

- Zone 7: Federal Capital Territory, and Niger States, with headquarters in Abuja (Federal Capital Territory)

- Zone 8: Kogi, and Kwara States, with headquarters in Lokoja (Kogi State)

- Zone 9: Abia, Ebonyi, and Imo States, with headquarters in Umuahia (Abia State)

- Zone 10: Kebbi, Sokoto, and Zamfara States, with headquarters in Sokoto (Sokoto State)

- Zone 11: Osun, and Oyo States, with headquarters in Oshogbo (Osun State)

- Zone 12: Bauchi, Borno, and Yobe States, with headquarters in Bauchi (Bauchi State)

- Zone 13: Anambra and Enugu States, with headquarters in Awka (Anambra State)

- Zone 14: Katsina and Kaduna with headquarters in Katsina.

- Zone 15: Borno and Yobe

- Zone 16: Bayelsa and Rivers States

- Zone 17: Ondo and Ekiti States with headquarters in Akure

Below each of these seventeen zones are State Commands, under which are Area Commands and then Divisional Commands.

According to Odinkalu (2010), B and D Departments (Operations and Criminal Investigations) are considered the most significant in the NPF. B Department manages and coordinates the police response to active threats with respect to law and order or public safety and security (such as riots, demonstrations, and situations of significant violence). Within B Department, the NPF has a rapid deployment paramilitary unit known as the Police Mobile Force (PMF) or MOPOL (Mobile Police). The tragedy of the deterioration in the structure and ranks of the NPF is that the roughly thirty thousand strong PMF were originally established and trained to act as a police strike force, but since then they have been reduced to orderly duties for VIPs—“special escort [e.g., armored truck guards], static guard, and road block duties” (Odinkalu, 2010). Meanwhile, armed marauders have taken over Nigerian streets and villages, robbing, kidnapping, and hacking innocent civilians to death without police response.

The D Department is responsible for the Force Criminal Investigations Department (FCID), and the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) is its counterpart at the State Command level. However, in the absence of an infrastructure for evidence-based policing, the SCIDs, like the MOPOL, have acquired a reputation for the habitual abuse of power. This includes unjustly detaining and torturing suspects (sometimes to death) during an investigation. The PMF, on the other hand, is mostly associated with (based on victim testimony) summary executions, usually by gunshot and often without cause.

Within the SCIDs are the dreaded Special Anti-Robbery Squads (SARS). These squads were created in response to a perceived nationwide escalation of robberies at gunpoint. One squad is positioned in each State Police Command, and together they are coordinated at the Force Headquarters by a commissioner of police. The excessive abuses and senseless brutality of SARS reached a crescendo in September of 2020, when Nigerian youth took to the streets to demand their dissolution in the now historic #ENDSARS nationwide protest.

****

Police Act 2020 In effect, despite the 377,000 strong police, which includes specialized units and zonal commands, the police have been ineffective in making a dent in crime in Nigeria. What a colonial inheritance.

3

Developing Effective Community-Policing Programs

The term “police” is derived from the Greek words polis and politeuein, which refer to being a citizen who participates in the affairs of the city or state (Scaramella et al., 2011). The implication is that policing in a community grows naturally out of the participation of its citizenry. When Robert Peel established the first known organized police—the London Metropolitan Police—it was based on the principle of community policing. This principle is reflected on the maxim of “the police are the public, and the public are the police.” Community-oriented policing (COP), is an approximation of community policing through collaboration and the shared effort between the police and the community that identifies and solves community crime and disorder problems (US Department of Justice, 1994). In the United States, hundreds of thousands of rapes are reported every year; but out of every one thousand reported rape cases, only about five achieve a conviction (US Department of Justice, 1994), leading to the conclusion that the community will be more effective in providing safety education to prevent rape because it seems to be hopeless to rely on the police to arrest rapists and convict them—prevention is better than conviction. In this joint enterprise, all members of the community become active allies in the communal effort to enhance the safety and quality of lives in a given neighborhood. However, as policing developed, its practice deviated from its original founding principle and became detached from the public under a new maxim of “we versus them” police culture powered by police autonomy, discretion, canteen culture, prejudice, and militarization.

Writing about “Social Control in Precolonial Igboland of Nigeria” Onyeozili and Ebbe (2012) established that the Igbo of South East Nigeria operated a very effective crime prevention and community policing system based on a unique system of government that Njaka (1974) described as “ohacracy.” In this Igbo communal system crime was rare because religion and law are intertwined in Igbo social systems to the point that their social, economic, and political life is profoundly influenced by a “pantheon of supernatural powers,” which operate within the human sphere in various ways as Anyasodo (1975) noted. Right from birth, the Igbo begin to teach their children the dos and don’ts in Igboland; the taboos, abominations, sacred and profane, sacrilege, and the importance of honor and dignity, respect for elders, women, and older siblings (Onyeozili and Ebbe 2012).

Hence, throughout the Igbo communities, social control was informal but efficient. There was no formalized police system in the modern sense of the word. The Igbo never had a centralized government in the form of a king with a consolidated power, but they were law-abiding people long before the advent and the spread of European influences. They had well-established norms of conduct and maintained numerous policing institutions for the express purpose of ensuring that laws were observed, and that order and harmony were maintained. Any infringement of laws was dealt with by the community (oha), under the direction of the elders, and this was the key to the success of the Igbo unique ohacracy system of government.

The judicial system of handling cases in precolonial Igboland was informal. The “court of original jurisdiction” was the “court of the father (husband) of a household.” Justice was primarily a family affair (Ebbe, 2003). The second level of “court” was the council of elders in the village. Each village was made up of people who were united by ties of consanguinity. The cases that reach the village or community council were interfamily, civil, or criminal victimizations. Civil matters were settled amicably, but criminal victimization had double-barreled penalty. The first “court of appeal” in precolonial Igbo judicial system was the diviner. The council of elders could submit suspects to the diviner who after some spiritual incantations, would identify an offender on whom an appropriate punishment would be meted by the elders (usually public shaming for minor crimes, or ostracism for extreme crimes and abominations).

The highest “court of appeal” in Igbo judicial system, in precolonial times, was the “oracle” (Uchendu, 1965). The most famous oracles in traditional Igboland were the Agbala of Awka, the Igwe-ka-Ala of Umunoha, the Kamalu of Ozuzu, the Ibini ukpabe of Aro-Chukwu (the “Long Juju”), the Mkpokiti abirikete of Umunze, and the Haba of Agulu. The common characteristics of the oracles and their operations were shrouded in a strict code of secrecy and the oracle was believed to be a lesser god with supernatural powers and was capable of connecting with the transcendental realm to get answers to questions of its consultants (Onyeozili and Ebbe, 2012). It was the fear of the public shaming/penalty or, of the (policing/punitive) powers of the oracle that kept criminals in check and crime at bay in precolonial Igboland. But colonialism and colonial policing destroyed this time-tested community policing system and replaced it with the existing colonial anarchy and brigand policing.

In Nigeria, formal policing was initially organized by the colonial goons to intimidate and subjugate the “natives,” and thereby enhance exploitation and servicing of the capitalist needs of colonialism (Onyeozili, 1998). For Alemika (1988), the colonial police force was not established to serve the interest or improve the lots of the colonized. Rather it was established to “enforce colonial repressive law and order, protect British interest,” and “ensure by ruthless means if necessary, that the various taxes imposed on the poor and oppressed colonized peoples were collected” (166).

Just as the concept of maintaining a police force originated in England, efforts toward improvement and professionalization of the police also began in England, in 1829, and then the United States, and specifically, through education and training. Although no research has been able to prove the necessity of a university degree for entry into the police or determined how much knowledge college graduates retain from their studies once they become engulfed in field police work, scholars generally believe that higher education is valuable in that it brings exposure to new ideas and improves positive decision making. Sociologists (Bressler, 1967; Saunders, 1970) have argued that college education provides ethical and moral indoctrination that legitimizes existing power arrangements and reinforces appropriate attitudes for the sustenance of democratic institutions and peaceful coexistence of diverse population groups. To Bressler, general education is the most efficient form of occupational training that may better equip students to meet unpredictable vocational demands (50).

Saunders (1970) further reinforces the importance of education because police work is obviously susceptible to “unpredictable vocational demands” (82). Currently, Nigeria employs three recruitment procedures for the constable, cadet inspector, and cadet assistant superintendent cadres, respectively. For these positions the minimum requirements are lower than West African School Certificate; General Certificate of Education “Ordinary” Level (WASC equivalent), in at least four subjects including English and math; and a four-year university degree respectively (Nigeria Police, 1981).

Clearly the colonial government understood the importance of education and training for effective policing, but it still took more than five decades to achieve any level of professionalization in the Nigerian police force. In the end, the final product Nigeria produced is today a far cry from what is obtainable in several sister African countries vis-a-vis other developed economies because the Nigerian police still regularly ranks near the bottom in the Corruption Perception Index, which is published annually by Transparence International (https://www.transparency.org/en/). The only difference is that while the colonial police used intimidation to service the needs of the colonial government, the post-independence Nigeria police officers intimidate, sometimes maim, and extort from the citizens to enrich their personal pockets.

Post-independence law in Nigeria is marked by entrenched colonial socialization. Following “freedom” from the colonial masters, the political class in Nigeria perpetuated the inherited hegemonic policing policy. While adapting to the Western culture (Onyeozili, 2005), the traditional values were compromised, and this had an adverse implication for the institution of law enforcement. The oppression and suppression of the opposition groups in the immediate post-independence era affected the effectiveness of Nigerian law enforcement agencies.

Colonialism changed Nigerian traditional laws and its rules, institutions, procedures, and meanings (Mann and Roberts, 1991). The police officers who were recruited to maintain law and order were mere colonial stooges without traditional values in areas where federalism was adopted. The relationship between the central authority and the regions was nothing but cordial. The jackboot socialization of early Hausa police (Ahire, 1991; Alemika, 1988; Crowder, 1978a; Ikime, 1977; Tamuno, 1970), unfortunately established the criteria for future relationships between the police and the communities they (dis)serve.

It is no wonder then that the police force Nigeria inherited at independence was a militarized force with little or no experience in human management and who were detached from the community it was designed to serve. In general, the only qualification to becoming an officer in colonial times was “a sound knowledge of drill,” a clear and practical knowledge of criminal law, a sober judgment, and great personal energy rather than previous experience in police duties (Tamuno, 1970). In practice, the police force, which was designed to be civilianized and citizen friendly, has been sadly colonial in nature, militaristic in outlook, and prepared to act as an occupational force.

In an analysis of 6,500 respondents randomly selected from the 1970 US National Crime Survey data set, Liska et al. (1988) find that fear of crime and constrained social behavior are part of a “positive escalating loop.” This positive escalating loop is defined as a process wherein fear constrains social behavior, which in turn increases fear. The study also finds that the strength of this loop is contingent on age, thus indicating that the elderly experience a stronger loop effect than the young. They claim that constrained social behavior increases rather than decreases fear, because the anticipated fear of entering a dangerous situation results in the avoidance of such situations, which in turn accentuates the fear (Onyeozili, 1994). In Nigeria, the police presence itself constitutes a “dangerous situation”; hence fear, rather than security is pervasive and constrains the behavior of much of the population.

The crime rate is increasing by the day in Nigeria. Daylight robberies and kidnappings for ransom have become the order of the day. Boko Haram and other terrorist activities have struck fear into the minds of ordinary citizens who are afraid to call the police whom they distrust more than they fear the criminals. It is therefore imperative that there is a great need to revolutionize the traditional force through training to become a people-oriented police force, and to be able the fight crime and restore order for four main compelling reasons.

First and historically, Nigeria is a colonial amalgam of diverse ethnicities who originally do not share any cultural background or values. In the North are the Kanuri, and predominantly Hausa people who were politically conquered and religiously Islamized by the Fulani, but who linguistically subdued the Fulani. In the Middle Belt region, are the Tivs, Birom, Idomas, and several other ethnic groups who are mainly Christians, each with its own distinct culture. In the South East which is mainly Christian are mainly the Igbo, Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, and few other ethnic groups. The Christian South West is a majority Yoruba, Edo, Itsekiri, Urhobo, Esan, and several other ethnic groups, some of whom share some cultural affinity. At the time when professional training would have changed the force, military coups and subsequent military dictatorships killed whatever remained of professionalism. These diverse ethnicities come with diverse interests, and the fractured Nigeria police has never been able to recover and become a cohesive caring entity responsive to the needs of the populace, hence the need for a transition to community policing.

Second is the issue of urbanization. The post-independent Nigeria police was a traditional force designed to serve the monocultural needs of an underdeveloped, and mainly local agricultural society with limited needs, viz, maintenance of law and order. Today Nigeria has grown and become urbanized and organic with several large cities in the thirty-six states of the federation. With urbanization comes sophistication and the multicultural needs of the populace (including crime prevention), which the old, antiquated police system can no longer satisfy. There is constant conflict between Nigeria’s modern and urbanized youth and its police force, which is not trained to understand and interact with them. What is needed, therefore, is fundamental change, both in terms of overall strategy and the organizational behavior of policing.

Third is the issue of technological advancement and a generational shift in values and perception. The twenty-first century is the epitome of the Internet and Wi-Fi age where the new generation can circumnavigate the world at the click of a mouse. Hunter et al. (2000) insists that perception issues exist between street police and the communities they are supposed to serve. Each views the other differently, which in turn leads to fundamental misunderstanding. In Nigeria it happens more often when police officers are posted to serve in communities other than their own because, lacking sensitivity training, they are more likely to misread situations and then exceed the boundaries of their authority in response.

Fourth, Nigerians do not trust their police because the force has been involved in illegal activity on several fronts ranging from extreme brutalization of citizens by Special Armed Robbery Response Squads (SARS) to bribery, framing innocent people to extort money, and outright killing innocent people for no apparent justifiable reason. Police have also been known to participate, either directly or indirectly, in supplying guns during armed robbery incidents. In short, many citizens have learned to be fearful of the police out of necessity. Some even constrain their behavior by staying home, not going out at night, or avoiding certain areas of the city to avoid encountering the police. Community policing is the best way to reestablish public trust and allay people’s fears. Following protests against police brutality with demands for #EndSARS, the government announced, in 2020, that SARS would be abolished and replaced with Special Weapons and Tactical unit (SWAT). What the government didn’t announce, however, was the establishment of community policing or the end of militarized policing, corruption, intimidation, and neocolonial governance.

In October 2020 Jibrin Ibrahim wrote a column in the Daily Trust newspaper entitled “It’s NOT about Dismantling SARS: It’s about Democratising Nigeria.” In it he provides, essentially, a brief history of a failing state:

In  2005, the Justice Ejiwunmi Presidential Commission on Reform of the Administration of Justice made substantial recommendations on Police Reform that were not implemented. President Obasanjo then established the Muhammadu Danmadami Presidential Commission on Police Reform in 2006 and the police refused to implement the report. When President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua came into power, he found out that the Dammadami report was not implemented so he established the M. D. Yusuf Presidential Committee on Police Reform to update the recommendations but once again, the police resisted reform. Yusuf in his report had pointed out that the Force has a workforce that is largely “ undesirable ” and complained that many of the police personnel were “ criminals. ” In 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan set up the Parry Osayande Presidential Commission on Police Reform Report and once again the police refused to implement the recommendations. The police therefore have the institutional memory that no Nigerian President has succeeded in making them implement reform, they simply say YES SIR and continue with what they have been doing. The youth know that which is why they continued with their demonstrations even after the police have once again promised they will reform themselves. We will have police reform when a Nigerian President imposes it on the institution .

Ibrahim could have mentioned the Justice Oputa Commission on Human Rights Violations in Nigeria just to illustrate the point that the problem goes beyond policing, as the title of the article rightly framed it. That being the case, Ibrahim drops the ball with his final sentence: “We will have police reform when a Nigerian President imposes it on the institution.” In a democracy the president alone is not expected to impose anything without checks and balances. It is the people on the streets demanding change who shall govern the people, by the people, and for the people to bring an end to police brutality, to the miitarization of civil society, and to neocolonial governance.

Community Policing

Community-oriented policing is defined by the US Department of Justice (2014) as “a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime” under the control of the police. Community policing differs from community-oriented policing in that the former is not under the control of a corrupt police force. Community policing is the way that people have protected themselves as members of the “polis” for thousands of years, even before there was an institution called the police. The aim is to proactively prevent crime before it happens, thereby eliminating any atmosphere of fear from the community. Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux (1990) refer to community policing as a new contract between the police and the community they serve based on mutual trust and respect that allows for individuals to accept responsibility as stakeholders in their own community safety affairs, thereby freeing the police to develop long-term solutions to community concerns and factors that contribute to crime.

In the United States, a number of cities have implemented community-oriented policing through diverse programs and practices, but the concept and principles supporting it are similar when it comes to planning and execution. That is, they all racially profile African American and Latino/a communities as the most likely to be criminal and thereby watch them more closely with some members of the communities maliciously reporting hoaxes against innocent people of color and resulting in increased police brutality as opposed by the Black Lives Matter movement. All in all, community policing goes beyond a cooperative working relationship between prejudiced police field officers in institutionally racist-sexist-imperialist societies and the oppressed communities they supposedly protect. According to David Bayley, “[C]ommunity policing means different things to different people—public relations campaigns, shopfronts and mini-stations, rescaled patrol beats, liaison with ethnic groups, permission for rank-and-file to speak to the press, Neighborhood Watch, foot patrols, patrol-detective teams, and door-to-door visits by police officers” (1988: 225).

In general, the whole concept behind community policing derives from bottom-up implementation and not just a feel good propaganda campaign by the police for more funding, more powers, and more impunity. Community policing reminds us that the community has always relied on its own members for protection in most cases while the police may be called in on rare cases to help resolve conflicts that get out of hand. The Nigerian Police Force is so corrupt that, in general, the only people who dare rely on its officers for protection are the rich who personally hire them as escorts and bodyguards. But in a society with deep social injustice, even the rich will not feel safe with battalions of mobile police officers guarding them.

Elements of Community Policing

The major elements of community policing include community partnerships, other governmental agencies, community members/groups, nonprofit/service provider groups, private businesses, and the media. Each (and other aspects) of these elements are the glue that holds the policing philosophy in place. Community partnership involves police development of positive relationships with the community by creating a forum where the community participates in discussions and the decision-making process in matters affecting the community. It does not imply that the police no longer exercise authority over law enforcement; rather, it employs the community trust, knowledge, and expertise in identifying crime-prone issues in advance and addressing them before they manifest (US Department of Justice, 2014). It also implies some level of civilianization giving room for the public to play a greater role in prioritizing and addressing public safety problems, leaving the sworn officers more room to attend to other law enforcement-related community issues.

In community policing, building community partnerships involves the inclusion of other governmental agencies and community groups whose staff live and work in the community, and so have a stake in its development. Some of these agencies include local government officials, prosecutors, probation and parole offices, social service and public works departments, neighboring law enforcement agencies, health and human services, child support services, ordinance enforcement, and schools (US Department of Justice, 1994; 2014). Some nongovernmental groups include churches, formal and informal community leaders, residents, visitors, and tourists. Others include victims’ groups, service clubs, support groups, issue groups, advocacy groups, community development corporations, and the faith community. In Nigeria where some of these agencies are nonexistent, there are other equivalent agencies or groups that will suffice.

Additionally, community policing will co-opt other groups like private businesses and the media. The business groups will serve to identify business-related sources of crime and help the police address the situation. The media will generally serve as a medium through which information is disseminated to the wider public. Such information includes publicizing community concerns and available solutions, new policies jointly developed under the police-community partnership, new laws, public perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime (US Department of Justice, 1994; 2014).

Other important key elements of community policing are organizational management and the administrative structure of local police departments. Generally, the management structure of every police department is a centralized authority whereby power devolves from the police captain or the divisional police officer (DPO) in Nigerian context. Since the goal of community policing is to reduce crime and disorder by careful examination of neighborhood problems, the implication is that the police must be immersed in the affairs of the community so that they can understand the people they serve in order to detect and solve their problems. For an effective immersion, the first step is the assignment of officers to a permanent beat to ensure that they get to know and understand their environment.

While it is true that several commissions have examined policing issues in the US (e.g., the 1967 US President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, the 1968 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, and the 1973 National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals), their findings are not only applicable to the United States. There is much that can be applied to policing in Nigeria as well (Carter, 2002; Scaramella et al., 2011) such as improving the quality of police personnel and the quality of officer preparation and training. Other recommendations include reforming the management structure of law enforcement agencies, improving police-community relations and service delivery, and redefining police responsibilities. All of these recommended changes could be—and need to be—implemented in Nigeria. In truth, they remain to be implemented fully in the United States, so Nigeria could actually leapfrog ahead of the US by addressing its policing practices through community-oriented policing.

The practical methods for effective enforcement of community-oriented policing include the establishment of different facets of efforts like command decentralization and a community police advisory board (CPAB) (Gascón and Roussell, 2019; US Department of Justice, 2014; Carter, 2002); neighborhood police substations, a resident officer program, and neighborhood-oriented policing (NOP) (Hunter et al., 2000; Wrobleski and Hess, 2006). Other efforts include problem-oriented policing (POP) (Hunter et al., 2000; Rosenbaum et al., 1998; Scaramella et al., 2011; Wrobleski and Hess, 2006); education/training and enlightenment (Carter, 2002; Wrobleski and Hess, 2006); and addressing broken windows (Kamalu and Onyeozili, 2018; Kelling and Coles, 1996; Wilson and Kelling, 1982).

The “broken windows” thesis posits that if minor anti-social behaviors are ignored in poor inner-city locations, they tend to lead to major crime hot spots and so, zero tolerance should be the guide to law enforcement officers. This thesis fails to explain why the suburbs with no broken windows tend to be the locations of most school shootings compared to poor inner-city schools. Nor does it address the issues raised by William Chambliss (1973) in “The Saints and the Roughnecks,” by Steve Box (1983) in Power, Crime and Mystifications, by Jeffrey Reiman in The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, by Paul Gilroy in “The Myth of Black Criminality,” by Stuart Hall, et al., on Policingthe Crisis, by Frank Pearce (1978) in Crimes of the Powerful, and by Biko Agozino in Counter-Colonial Criminology to show that most of the poor remain overwhelmingly law abiding while many of the rich get away with crimes.

The first step in creating community policing is community identification. Flynn (1998) refers to the traditional community as a paradigm that varies from one individual to the next based on each individual’s background, socialization, education, and general perceptions of society. Based on this definition, some think of a community as a residential neighborhood, or a city, county, or region. Other individuals may interpret a community to mean people who live in each geographic, housing development, or political area. Yet some others may think of community based on ethnic, racial, or cultural groups (Igbo, Efik, Ijaw, Yoruba, and so forth), or as a people with shared common interests like business academic, and such. Similarly, it could be a nontraditional community of a collection or set of groups who share the characteristics of a community, such as businesses, residents, and tourists who may inhabit an area temporarily or permanently, but who share a common interest in crime reduction and maintaining order. In the case of Nigeria where these markers are not well delineated, and that has a national police system, we shall use the geographic area covered by a state authority as a community for implementation.

The next step in command decentralization (Gascón and Roussell, 2019; US Department of Justice, 2014; Carter, 2002), is creating mini police stations in communities headed by frontline field sergeants. Sequel to this phase is delegating decision-making authority to the frontline sergeant (who does not have to refer to a command captain in decisions concerning their beat), and officers who will feel accountable and take responsibility for their decisions and role in community policing. Decentralized decision making involves the devolution of the authority hierarchy of the agency and allowing officers to use their discretion in handling calls, in decision making, in coordinating various resources to address a problem, and the autonomy to establish relationships within the community.

In addition to decentralization and local mini police station is the resident officer program, and neighborhood- oriented policing (NOP) (Hunter et al., 2000; Wrobleski and Hess, 2006). This feature comes with a permanent beat assignment for all officers who are required to live in the community they serve. By owning their beat and residing in the community, the police officers will get to know the residents, interact face-to-face with the residents, and build the community trust. Where feasible, these community officers should mainly patrol the community on foot or bicycles as part of NOP, attend joint police-community planning meetings, and develop and coach local sports activities with teens and children in the neighborhood, all of which will make information gathering easier and for the officer to know when there is a potential problem in the community.

Decentralization is often complemented with a community police advisory board (CPAB), which is a civilian board set up to investigate police excesses and recommend punishment. Although not a favorite of the police, Wrobleski and Hess (2006) posit that a CPAB maintains successful oversight of policing agencies by investigating complaints with the authority to refer cases for prosecution. They take a proactive role of investigating the underlying causes of police misconduct, analyze them, and recommend disciplinary actions against erring officers, thereby discouraging future occurrence and copycats. Reparative justice in the form of substantial payouts for the victims of police brutality is also recommended.

Problem-oriented policing (POP) (Hunter et al., 2000; Rosenbaum et al., 1998; Scaramella et al., 2011; Wrobleski and Hess, 2006) is a proactive department-wide policing strategy of targeting a particular persistent societal problem and then uprooting it in a timely manner before it escalates. A good example is the removal of prostitutes and drug dealers from the streets. In Nigeria, it will be a daunting task because we have many target groups (prostitutes, Internet fraudsters—aka yahoo-yahoo boys—drug dealers, and so forth) that it may overwhelm the police. This is usually achieved through directed patrol as the primary solution strategy and a close collaboration with the community to obtain required information. The only setback in this policy is that single-item enforcement might result in crime displacement instead of elimination. Since this type of enforcement is dependent upon community collaboration for information, it may run into problems in Nigeria where people might be reluctant to give the names of criminals due to family affinity or fear of retaliation. Community and police trust and accountability will make a difference here.

The broken window theory of policing was popularized by the work of Wilson and Kelling (1982), which argued that when community disorder goes unchecked and reaches a critical mass, it creates more serious crime problems and urban decay. Using the broken window analogy, Kamalu and Onyeozili (2018) concur that broken windows in a community depict signs of instability, decay, high crime rates, and lack of order and social control. Simply put, if minor offenses are allowed to fester and offenders go unchecked, they may up the ante and indulge in more serious crimes. For example, leaving the front lawn of a home unkempt suggests to a potential burglar that the homeowners are not home, so also with daily newspapers piling up at the front porch/door. Hence, the need to address these issues as quickily and as efficiently as possible using proactive policing tactics. But there are no unkept lawns or pile-up of daily nespapers at Nigerian homes and so the broken windows thesis is less relevant in Nigeria than garbage heaps on urban street corners, but they are connected with sanitation and not with crime hotspots.

According to Kelling and Coles (1996), the success of broken window approach is built on four pillars:

1. Putting police in close contact with those who are predisposed to commit crime.

2. Projecting high police presence and visibility, which has a strong deterrence on potential criminal elements and perpetrators of crime.

3. Enhancing the ability of citizens to take control of their neighborhoods thereby preventing crime.

4. Promoting the cooperation of the police and community in fighting crime through an integrated approach.

Finally, police education, continuous in-service training, and public enlightenment (Carter, 2002; Wrobleski and Hess, 2006) seems to be the most important aspect of community policing and COP. Carter et al., (1989) found that college-educated police recruits are slightly more likely to employ alternative approachs rather than making arrests. By this assertion, they are stating that higher education plays a role in improving police decision-making processes. For Nigeria, where almost all noncommissioned police officers do not have a four-year college degree, the authors argue that it is imperative to suggest that thorough training and continuing in-service training must be mandatory for community policing and for COP to work.

Additionally, the authors posit that public enlightenment program must be part of any community policing and COP. That is, using the media to disseminate pertinent information and educate the general public concerning the new policing approach. Where possible, a joint sensitization education class may be designed for the patrol officers and community leaders in order to build trust and allay fears. To this end, the police must use the media as an effective tool to sell the new policing method.

In summary, an effective community policing that Nigeria needs should take care of the obstacles identified in Onyeozili (2005), namely, changing public perception of the nation’s police image as a bribery and corruption-ridden agency by declaring total war against police graft as a starting point in the professionalization of the force. In practice it involves creating a new police czar who would make corruption reduction a major goal. Toward this end, the police should stop criminal prosecutions and defer them to another government agency like the director of public prosecutions (DPP). Fear of prosecution by an independent agency will also reinforce discipline and make it easier to control police corruption and excesses.

Furthermore, an immediate revision of the Nigerian police pay scale is needed as a first step toward discipline. In all developed societies, the salary of a police officer is above that of ordinary citizens with an equivalent education. A decent pay matched with a fixed pay day is a worthwhile investment that will encourage restraint from acceptancing bribes to augment their meager income. The police should be shielded from political appointments because such appointments corrupt the officers, destroy espirit de corps, skew their sense of neutrality and impartiality, and infuse a sense of allegiance to appointing authority. It is a major obstacle to police effectiveness and must be discouraged at all cost if improved police performance and CP must be achieved.

The role of police in any civilized society is to serve and protect the citizens, so efforts should be made to fully professionalize the police through further training and re-education such as targeted special college equivalent classes in social sciences and criminal law procedures. This would improve the police officer’s human relations capacity. With professionalism goes meritorious recruitment and depoliticization. Police officers should be recruited based on an established minimum criteria and educational standard. People who do not qualify should not have a place in community policing and in COP. Meritorious recruitment will enhance meritorious promotion since officers will aspire to get to the top, and not await promotion as a birthright. Local criteria should be set by local agencies as they deem fit to serve the needs of individual local communities.

We therefore argue for the decentralization of the Nigerian Police Force, fully aware that the misuse of local police forces by regional governments contributed immensely to the collapse of the First Republic. It is a fact of recent memory that while the Dogarai were used to intimidate non-Muslims in the Northern region, the Western regional government under the political Action Group used the regional police (Olopa) to maim and burn the opposition in the operation wetie (dousing opposition candidates or supporters with gasoline and setting them ablaze). While decentralization might not be a panacea to a perfect police force, it will however improve their effectiveness in the communities they serve. The British colonialist’s recognition of the need for local police prompted the replacement of earlier Hausa police in Lagos with indigenous Yoruba recruits in 1895. We recommend a three-tier police structure without any prosecutorial power: the federal police, the state police, and the local government police. While the federal and state police departments deal with federal and state law enforcement matters, the local government police (supervised by a civilian board) will be organized in keeping with a community policing model in which officers are embedded in the communities they serve, deployed solely to deal with matters of law and order that are best handled at the local level. Not only will this bring people closer to their police, it will prevent the hijacking of the police command by corrupt and tainted absentee politicians in Abuja. The common practice of using police intimidation in poll rigging and “electing” the president’s yes men as distinguished senators, honorable members of legislative houses, and excellencies of the governors’ mansions, will become a thing of the past, and the opposition will have a voice as in other democracies.

In conclusion, we have argued in this chapter for the establishment of COP and of community policing in Nigeria. We have also laid out the steps that need to be taken for this to happen, and, based on all available evidence, the benefits are immense. On the police side, it creates a sense of family and service partnership between the police and the communities they serve. It has also been shown that COP is a problem-solving approach because it engages the public and the police in a joint effort that enhances the ability of the police to obtain the necessary information to solve crime and maintain order. Onyeozili (2005) has enumerated the conditions that are conducive to effective COP, and they include the professionalization of the Nigerian Police Force so that it can effectively discharge its civic duties to society. Thorough professionalism would be achieved through further training and re-education (such as targeted special college equivalent classes in social sciences and criminal law) designed to improve the overall human relations capacity of the police.

Police personnel should refocus their attention on the fundamental task of being responsible to the communities they serve, as this one change would go a long way toward fostering peaceful relationships between the police and the people. Local agencies should be responsible for setting the criteria they deem fit to serve the needs of their communities. Toward this goal, we have argued for decentralization of the Nigerian Police Force, fully aware that it is not a panacea to crime-free society and that the misuse of local police force by regional governments contributed immensely to the collapse of Nigeria’s First Republic.

Moreover, and as suggested by the US Department of Justice (2014), in planning for a COP program, the internal affairs department should have a written statement reflecting a nationwide commitment to community policing and a plan that matches operational needs to available resources and expertise. The Internal Affairs Department and police officers should also be well versed in all components of COP. As an example, there must be a concise police mission and values statement to be communicated to the benefiting community. There should also be clear and institutionalized problem solving and partnership plans in COP policies and procedures to ensure that community policing principles and practices impact the target community. However, our proposal is to move beyond the community-oriented policing (COP) found in parts of the United States because their approach has not eliminated police misconduct and racist-sexist-classist abuse that prompted the Black Lives Matter movement. We prefer to see community policing in addition to community-oriented policing in Africa.

In order to prevent impunity for police misconduct so as to restore confidence in the police, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime handbook (UNODC, 2011), suggests the establishment of an independent oversight body (like the Internal Affairs Department) free from police management, executive, and political influence with subpoena powers responsible for timely investigation of all complaints and making recommendations. This unit will also maintain supervisory oversight in situations involving death in police custody, with the police carrying the burden of explaining how the death occurred. The same body must ensure that failure of police management to implement recommended preventive measures to forestall future misconduct will lead to disciplinary sanctions, including dismissal of responsible supervisors from service and defunding by redirecting funds to community agencies that are responsive to community needs.

In line with international law, effective police accountability, integrity, and compliance with law is a requirement for all police officers including the Nigerian police. To ensure compliance, the Nigerian Police Force has to reward behavior that promotes the development of a culture of integrity including encouragement of whistleblowing, with a zero tolerance for internal corruption, bribery, biased recruitment practice, skewed promotion, and other unethical conducts of any kind. Additionally, all police officials should receive continued law enforcement professional education and training with a special emphasis on ethics and integrity, take a mandatory ethical oath, and must pass a standardized test on ethics and integrity as a criterion for promotion. The government must be ready to pay reparative justice to all victims of police brutality.

4

Models/Best Practices of Community Policing

Community policing is a challenging concept, one that did not magically appear to solve society’s ills. It is a new concept that started taking its place in policing across the globe to solve the problem of crime and to involve communities in the criminal justice process. Community policing is a new concept in policing that involves the interaction between the police and the citizens in the community in a positive way and with a common effort to prevent and control crime (Amadi, 2014). According to the Office of Community Oriented Policing Service: “Community Policing is a philosophy that promotes organization strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues, such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime” (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2014: 1). Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux (1990) stated that “community policing is a philosophy and not a specific tactic: a proactive decentralized approach, designed to reduce crime, disorder, and fear of crime, by involving the same officers in the same community for a long-term basis”.

Skogan (2004) enumerated four general principles to define community policing: community engagement, problem solving, organizational transformation, and crime prevention by citizens and police working together. This is what community policing simply means, citizens and police working together with a common goal of solving crime and maintaining public order. As Peak and Barthe (2009) put it: “Community policing goes beyond simply putting officers on foot or bicycle patrols or in neighborhood stations. It redefines the role of the officer on the street, from crime fighter to problem solver and neighborhood ombudsman. It forces a cultural transformation of the entire department including a decentralized organizational structure and changes in recruiting, training, awards systems, evaluation, promotions, and so forth. Further, this philosophy asks officers to break away from the binds of incident-driven policing and to seek proactive and creative resolution to crime and disorder.”

It is very important to cite the nine guiding principles of policing by consent originally set forth by Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing (Miller et al, 2018). These principles require public consent to policing and so it was not intended to be by force unless the police need to use physical force to stop a crime that is taking place (principle 6). These principles will guide us in our discussion of community policing.

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.

3. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain public respect.

4. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes, proportionately, to necessity for the use of physical force.

5. The police seek and preserve public favor, not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to the law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws; by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of society without regard to their race or social standing.

6. The police should use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning are found to be insufficient.

7. The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police are the only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties that are incumbent on every citizen in the interest of the community welfare.

8. The police should always direct their actions toward their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary by avenging individuals or the state.

9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them (Miller et al, 2018).

Policing Models

Traditional or Reactive Policing

In general, traditional policing emphasizes routine patrol and responding to crime after it occurs with rapid response to calls for service accompanied by follow-up investigations and arrests. This is accomplished largely through hierarchal structures that have been designed to limit citizen interaction with police, in part because of the fear of encouraging police corruption (Kelling and Moore, 1988) In this type of model officers barely know anyone in the areas where they are responding. There is nothing in place in this type of policing to prevent crime from happening. This type of policing functions like the Fire Department.

Predictive Policing

This is the use of predictive and analytical techniques in law enforcement to identify potential offenders. Not much is heard about this system precisely because it is a secretive tool that solves the least number of crimes and remains unpopular because it relies on racial profiling to target people of color even when they are not necessarily more crime prone. Increasingly, computer algorithms are used to collate enormous amounts of digital information about social media postings and phone calls while closed-circuit televisions are mounted on public places and business premises to capture surveillance videos that could be used to identify suspects after the fact. Civil liberties advocates oppose these on the ground that they invade the privacy of law-abiding people.

Problem–Oriented Policing (POP)

The works of Herman Goldstein in the early 1970s and the experiments in the early 1980s in Madison, Wisconsin; Baltimore County, Maryland; and Newport News, Virginia serve as the basis for the problem-oriented policing movement. The emphasis in this type of policing is on preventing crime before it happens. Detectives watch for patterns of crimes to help to understand when and how crimes are being committed. Once the pattern is known they will search for ways to stop crimes from happening in that area. This is a proactive style of policing but it may simply displace crime to other places rather than prevent crime completely.

Community – Oriented Policing (COP)

This system focuses on the police building relationships with the community. The officers will be known by the community and the community will know the officers in their beat. The officers rely on the community to report suspicious behavior or tips on criminals in their area. The system creates a kind of relationship between the officers and the community and creates some elements of trust. We will be discussing more on this model.

Reassurance Policing

This is similar to community policing in that it involves the community in solving community-related problems. It also aims to identify signal crimes that shape a community’s perception of risk from a particular type of crime during a given period.

Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment (SARA)

This refers to the four key steps in problem solving and to the decision-making process. (It will be discussed later in the chapter.)

Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP)

Intelligence-led policing is a management and resources allocation approach to law enforcement using data collection and intelligence analysis to set specific priorities for all manner of crime, including those associated with terrorism. ILP is a collaborative approach based on improved intelligence operations and community-oriented policing and problem solving, which the field of law enforcement has considered beneficial for many years (Office of Homeland Security, 2002).

CompStat

Originating in New York City in 1994 under the leadership of then Commissioner of Police William Bratton, CompStat is a progressive, goal-oriented, information-driven police management strategy based on four core components: (1) accurate and timely collection of crime data and intelligence analysis, (2) rapid deployment of personnel and other resources, (3) effective tactics and strategies to address crime and disorder, and (4) relentless follow up, assessment, and accountability (Jang, Hoover, Joo, 2010). It encourages police agencies to focus on crime reduction goals through specific policies and procedures supported by timely information and improved technology. CompStat is compatible with community policing and can be used to build problem solving and accountability for innovative partnership.

Essential Elements of Community Policing

Three essential elements of community policing are partnership, problem solving, and organizational change (Morabito, 2010).

Partnership

Community policing is based on the notion that citizens should be empowered to prevent crime or the problems that lead to crime (Stevens, 2001). This partnership can equally help police in identifying possible crime and criminal activities around the community. Partnership is an indispensable relationship between the police and the public. Partnerships are central to modern-day policing because they recognize a basic truth—law enforcement cannot do it alone (Peed, 2008). This partnership should be developed in order to build trust in the police to find solutions to problems. Police can rarely solve public safety problems alone, hence police community relationships should encourage interactive partnerships with relevant stakeholders. The partnership between the police and public can be used to accomplish the two interrelated goals of developing solutions to problems through collaborative solving and improving public trust.

The partnership can also be extended to several groups in the community; those who live and work in the community, community leaders, and private business owners who bring considerable resources to the community. The media should also be included because it can bring considerable information to the community. The media will assist in publicizing community concerns and available solutions to them.

Problem Solving

Spelman and Eck (1987) state that problem–oriented policing converges on three main themes: increase effectiveness, reliance on the expertise and creativity of officers, and closer involvement with the community. These themes are implemented by attacking underlying conditions that deplete patrol officers’ and detectives’ time and educating officers to study problems and develop innovative solutions to ensure that police address the needs of citizens.

This is a very broad term that can be described as the process by which specific issues or concerns are identified and the most appropriate remedies to abate the problem(s) are identified. Community policing encourages agencies to proactively develop solutions to the immediate underlying conditions contributing to public safety problems. SARA is a major conceptual way for helping officers think about problem solving in a structured and disciplined way. SARA is:

Scanning: identifying and prioritizing the problem
Analysis: researching what is known about the problem;
Response: developing solutions to bring about lasting reductions in the number and extent of problem; and
Assessment: evaluating the success of the responses. Using the crime triangle (victim/offender/location) to focus on immediate conditions.

Organizational Change

Organizational change in community policing involves the decentralization of police power where beat officers have the power to solve problems and make operational decisions that are very suitable to their assignments. Individual officers are given the freedom to resolve concerns within the community without consulting the head office because they are very familiar with the community.

Organization transformation involves the integration of the community policing philosophy into the mission statement, policies and procedures, performance evaluations, hirings, promotional practices, training programs, and other systems and activities that define the organizational culture and activities of a police department (US Department of Justice, 2014).

Models of Community Policing

United States of America

The history of policing in the United States falls into three significant eras. The political era from 1840 to 1930. During this era the police was decentralized (but racist), provided social services to the (white) community, and were anxious to have an intimate relationship with the (middle class white) community. The second period was the reform era from the 1930s to the 1980s, during which time the police was centralized and their focus was on crime control (racist repression of the Civil Rights Movement and counter intelligence programs against the anti-war movement) and they lost their relationship with the public they served. The third era is the community era in which we are interested. Here the police became more decentralized, and their focus was on improving the quality of life in communities and building relationships with the people they serve (but Black Lives Matter protests have brought to light continuing problems of institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism in policing).

Community policing is associated with the February 1968 Kerner Commission Report from the President’s National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorder. At the center of the report was the level of racism in the country and calls for aid to African American communities to avoid the rising racial polarization and violence. Hence law enforcement started changing their attitudes and became more responsive to the desire of the public for a different kind of policing. This period started with so many names such as community policing, community-oriented policing (COP), and neighborhood policing. But, the most important thing at this period is that police officers became a part of the community and not apart from the community as was envisaged by Robert Peel: “The police are the public and the public are the police.”

The 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, ushered in the hiring of one hundred thousand new police officers and allocated $11 billion dollars to American law enforcement. The important thing about this act was its provision “to foster problem solving and interaction with communities by police officers, that is, to encourage and accelerate transitions to community policing by police agencies throughout the country” (Skogan, 2004: 3). The act actually was the basis for the creation of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). It also authorized COPS to spend $9 billion on grants to state, local, and other law enforcement agencies on supporting functions, which included training and technical assistance in community policing through the Community Policing Consortium. The act also sought to advance community policing throughout the United States.

In the executive summary of the “Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing,” May 2015, under President Barack Obama, there are six pillars, of which community policing is the fourth. Here are the recommendations:

1. Law enforcement agencies should develop and adopt policies and strategies that reinforce the importance of community engagement in managing public safety.

2. Community policing should be infused throughout the culture and organizational structure of law enforcement agencies.

3. Law enforcement agencies should engage in multidisciplinary, community team approaches for planning, implementing, and responding to crisis situations with complex casual factors.

4. Communities should support a culture and practice of policing that reflects the values of protection and promotion of the dignity of all, especially the most vulnerable.

5. Community policing emphasizes working with neighborhood residents to co-produce public safety. Law enforcement agencies should work with community residents to identify problems and collaborate on implementing solutions that produce meaningful results for the community.

6. Communities should adopt policies and programs that address the needs of children and youth most at risk for crime or violence and reduce aggressive law enforcement tactics that stigmatize youth and marginalize their participation in school and communities.

The report summarized that:

[L]aw enforcement’s obligation is not only to reduce crime but also to do so fairly while protecting the rights of citizens. Any prevention strategy that unintentionally violates civil rights, compromises police legitimacy, or undermines trust is counterproductive from… both ethical and cost-benefit perspective(s). Ignoring these considerations can have both financial costs (e.g., lawsuits) and social costs (e.g., loss of public support). It must be stressed that the absence of crime is not the final goal of law enforcement. Rather, it is the promotion of and protection of public safety while respecting the dignity and rights of all. And public safety and well-being cannot be attained without the community’s belief that well-being is at the heart of all enforcement activities. It is critical to help community members see the police as allies rather than as an occupying force and to work in concert with other community stakeholders to create more economically and socially stable neighborhood.” (President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing)

Community policing in the United States has undoubtedly achieved certain goals such as reducing crime and increasing the feeling of safety among (some) community members. Of course, numerous problems persist, such as racial profiling (as used in Stop and Frisk), the war on drugs, and the use of deadly force, which have led many to fear the police even more. Still, it seems clear that when police officers work in partnership with their communities, crime rates decline. The community policing, problem-solving philosophy has helped officers identify problems in their communities and (in partnership with those communities) find ways to address them.

In Gary, Indiana, the police have made community-oriented policing training mandatory. The Police Department established a regular community forum led by police officers, and all public safety officers participate in programs like the neighborhood cleanup, sporting, and community services programs, and some and have even supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Police also engage the community and neighborhood leaders to address crime directly, the factors that cause crime, and the ways to prevent it.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti created a new LAPD Division entirely dedicated to community outreach. It is also involved in cutting-edge technologies with outfitting its officers with body cameras and other programs dedicated to deepening its relationship with the diverse LA communities. Some of these programs address gang reduction and youth development and the Domestic Abuse Response Team program.

In Houston, Texas, the initial police community program started as the Fear Reduction Project to “create a sense of community in the area, and to identify a group of residents who would work regularly with the police to define and solve neighborhood problems” (Pate et al., 1986). The police organized a door-to-door survey to find people willing to work with the police or host meetings to identify problems in the community. From these meetings came a neighborhood cleaning campaign, safehouses, and a drug information seminar. The project was ultimately successful: door-to-door contact helped the police in solving common local problems, the frequency of social disorder declined, and residents reported a more positive evaluation of the police.

What remains to be seen is the long-term impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, which of course has called for a number of important reforms including the defunding of militarized policing and more funding for community safety initiatives.

Brazil

With the relative success of community policing in parts of the United States where the poor, women, and people of color are kept under the dominance of imperialist, patriarchal, white supremacy, the settler-colonial state of Brazil began its quest for community policing in the 1980s. With the increasing evidence of racism-sexism-classism in relations between the public and the police in Brazil, the federal government in 1996 recommended that all of the Brazilian states should implement community policing programs. Following the guidelines, the federal government established the Consulting Commission for the Implementation of Community Policing. There are fourteen Brazilian states with community-policing programs.

At the beginning it was difficult to get the chauvinist police force in Rio de Janeiro to accept the concept of community policing because they considered it to be soft, easy “women’s work.” Such a prejudiced view serves to further expose the racism, sexism, and exploitation that informed conventional policing in Brazil (Musumeci et al., 1996: 30).

Copacabana and Leme were pilot areas to introduce community policing because they comprise many different sections of urban life. They house high-income residential neighborhoods, luxury hotels, popular beaches, and a vibrant night life. However, they also house some poor neighborhoods, or favelas, and report a booming drug trade. The police there faced numerous operational difficulties including poor salaries, a lack of roads leading to the poorer neighborhoods, and constant power cuts that made everything very difficult for the police.

Community policing became difficult in Copacabana and Leme because of the distrust people have toward the police. Many citizens blame the police for most of the civilian deaths and suspect that they support the drug trade. The police claimed that they were underequipped, that they were poorly trained, and that the institution they worked for was highly corrupt. The solution was to implement community policing to change the image of the police and to gain the confidence of the people they serve.

The Copacabana area was divided into six patrol areas to which 60 specially trained police officials were assigned, with the freedom to develop their own patrol routine in order to truly become familiar with the local problems and to develop their role as co-authors of preventive rather than repressive solutions. The officials were split among 26 neighborhoods within the six general patrol areas and charged with the responsibility of fostering relationships with shop owners, doormen, residents, newsstand vendors, homeless people, and other community members by talking on the street, inside cafes, bars, or shops in order to more effectively identify and resolve problems in each sub-sector (Freire et al., 1996).

The community was then required to be grouped into six committees or community councils. Members were recruited from churches, schools, hotels, neighborhood committees, unions, business groups, banks, and other establishments and each council worked with the police officers in their areas to identify threats to public safety and to propose and implement solutions. Communications between the public and the police was further improved by using suggestions boxes to lodge complaints about the police and also report safety concerns in the neighborhood, and a hotline for community members to call in incidents was established.

In São Paulo the military police adopted the community policing philosophy with three main goals: (a) to integrate community opinion into improving quality of service, (b) to change the image of the police force, and (c) to reduce crime. Forty-one locations were chosen out of which twenty-two were in the metropolitan area and nineteen in the surrounding areas. The Consulting Commission for the Implementation of Community Policing, comprised of police representatives and civic organizations, held bi-weekly meetings that served as a starting point for the development of a dialogue between the police and the public. While the commission included community members, military police commanders led the meetings and set the agenda (Neto, 1998).

In his study, Kahn (2000) found that in districts with community-policing programs where the public had knowledge of the program, fear of crime was reduced and public satisfaction with the police increased. In addition, the results showed that more than half of the surveyed respondents felt that the community police officers were more educated, more accommodating, and less violent than the traditional police. Yet, while the public viewed the community police more positively than the traditional police on most measures, the survey also showed that they believed that the traditional police were more effective than community police, perhaps because authoritarian populism tends to win the support of the masses for the use of force even when the abusive use of force makes matters worse. (Cavalcanti [2020] found that the police in Brazil are among the main purveyors of street violence among the poor dwellers of favelas.) While these programs may not directly reduce crime, they function as a conduit to foster improved relations between the community and the police and reduce fear among residents.

Israel

Brigadier General Danny Gimshi, a former police commissioner, was exposed to the idea of community policing while at Harvard University as a Wexler Fellow at the Kennedy School. The formation of community policing in Israel was seen as a total reformation of the Israeli police. Gimshi (1994) noted that the responsibilities of community policing included: training police officers, citizens, public officials at the city level and employees of other community services; developing community policing projects in police stations, based on multiagency work and problem-oriented policing methods; and encouraging an organizational culture that would support community policing within the Israeli National Police. He added that the implementation of community policing would include:

- adopting activities that change the values, opinions, attitudes, and job perception of police officers at all ranks of the organization;

- incorporating activities to initiate and develop programs and organizational mechanisms to enhance cooperation between the police, groups, and organizations in the broader community; and

- giving the unit the responsibility for implementing community policing for the Israeli National Police as a whole. In the first year of the program four stations were chosen as models for the initial implementation of community policing. A plan was developed that called for the implementation of community policing in all seventy police stations in the country by the year 2003.

After the country of Israel was established it faced a large wave of immigration. The police were involved in what is called the absorption process, language instruction, and helping the communities deal with natural or security emergencies at a time when Palestinians were being expelled en masse from their homes and the land was being seized for the settlement of Jews. The oppressive policing of the Palestinians contradict the claims that: “These roles, it should be noted, are consistent with the important element of the community policing model, which seeks to broaden the police mandate beyond crime control to other community problems” (Leighton, 1991, 1994; Sparrow, 1988; Sparrow et al., 1990).

There were so many programs that were developed in many parts of Israel. In mid-1990 Asaf Chefetz brought the police and community together to identify drug dealers and problem locations in Beit Dagon. The result was praised because it reduced drug activity in the area but the Israeli government also experimented with the decriminalization of marijuana for medical uses. The police and Naamat (a women’s advocacy organization) cooperated in responding to issues of family violence. Another program was also developed for drug addicts in cooperation with Narcotics Anonymous groups in Beer Sheva and the evaluation of this program produced encouraging findings (Yehezkeally and Shalev, 1995). Moreover, following the Oslo Accord, the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority agreed to allow the Palestinians to take over policing responsibilities in Gaza and the West Bank; however, the policing by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority remained mainly militarized.

Although community policing might appear to have been implemented in Israel, there were challenges of transitioning from a militarized type of policing to community policing. Community policing in Israel also faced a lot of problems because the reformation it sought was too ambitious. Community policing as was defined in Israel required remaking of the Israeli police officer in terms of philosophy and behavior, a restructuring of police work, a restructuring of management within the police, a change in the relationship between the police and the public, and a change in the priorities of public work (Weisburd, Shalev, Amir, 2002). Perhaps community policing would only be fully implemented in Israel when the conflict with the Palestinians is resolved in a single federal republican solution with multiple states and equal rights for both Palestinians and Jews.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has successfully operated a community policing scheme that in London every ward has a fully staffed neighborhood policing team. Police teams work in every ward in London with local communities to fight crime and anti-social behaviors. It was observed that people from communities expressed satisfaction with the police presence in their neighborhoods, but people also demanded more transparency and accountability regarding allegations of police brutality. With the work being done by the police and community there is a significant decrease in crime, though incarcerations remain high. The police, the local wardens, and other stakeholders in the community meet regularly to identify problem areas and means of solving the problems, but deaths in police custody and unsatisfactory investigation of racist violence have caused widespread protests in some communities.

Policing in the United Kingdom has always embraced one of the principles laid out by Robert Peel, that is, “the police are the public and the public are the police.” However, at a certain time of their history the police started to lose respect with the public and what used to be foot patrol was replaced by car patrol. Police stations no longer functioned twenty-four hours and the gap between the public and police continued to widen, and as a result of this community policing started to emerge in a number of Police Authorities in the United Kingdom. The Scarman Report (Scarman and GBHO, 1982), which followed the Brixton disorders of 1981, exposed some of the shortcomings in police-community relations. The report identified that the police service had become unresponsive and uncommunicative to the community. Policing was said to be police-oriented not community oriented, with the need for policing to shift toward a “service” ethos (Savage, 2007). Paul Gilroy (1982) warned that the ideology of black criminality was being used by some left-wing scholars to support the colonialist policing of black neighborhoods, whereas there is no such thing as black criminality. Hall et al. (1979) also warned that the oppressive policing of black communities due to the media’s amplification of deviance would also affect poor working-class white communities adversely.

The 2005–2006 British Crime Survey showed that despite falling crimes level, approximately two-out-of-three survey respondents thought that nationally crime had increased from the previous two years (Jansson, 2006). Even though the crime rate was low, the public had little confidence in police service. This phenomenon led to the development of what was known as “Reassurance Policing,” launched to test the concept of community reassurance that was aimed to reduce crime and disorder, increase public confidence, and narrow the reassurance gap. It sought to reduce the fear of crime and improve public confidence in the police through three delivery mechanisms:

- engaging with communities to identify local concerns and priorities;

- targeting police resources at tackling these concerns; and

- creating a visible and accessible police presence (Tuffin, et al., 2006).

In November 2004 the government published the white paper “Building Communities, Beating Crime” with the intention of improving police accountability and increasing the level of engagement with the local community. Hence the birth of neighborhood policing, which is the equivalent of community policing that emphasizes a physical presence of the police, public engagement, and the prevention of crime. Agozino (2018) discovered that neighborhood watch schemes were prejudiced against black people in the community who were often reported to the police as loitering with the intent to commit crimes. He also found that the majority of black women in prison in England and Wales were convicted of drug-related offences and that innocent black women were often targeted by the police for violent attacks when they were known to be proximate to suspected black men. Agozino recommends the decolonization of policing, the decriminalization of drugs, and the education of healthcare services to manage the harms of legally regulated drugs.

The independent review of neighborhood policing conducted by Sir Ronnie Flanagan recommended that neighborhood policing should become a “core” activity of a police force’s business, occurring within and through local partnership structures to effectively tackle crime, fear of crime, and quality of life issues. It stated that neighborhood policing (and community engagement) should look different in every neighborhood—there is no one size fits all. Flanagan identified three critical factors for ensuring successful delivery:

- visible, accessible, and locally known authority figures;

- community involvement; and

- strong relationships and joint working with partners (Flanagan, 2007, 2008).

K enya

Kenya, like many other Africa countries, inherited the colonizing country’s system of policing; but Kenya also suffers from the unequal access to land due to the relative imposition of settler colonialism that was resisted by the Mau Mau Land and Freedom Army. Kenya played a leading role in peacekeeping in its region. While it was playing this role there was a high level of insecurity in Kenya, there were a lot of violent crimes involving firearms and this caused a lot of social and economic problems in the poor communities while the corrupt elites robbed the country blind. As a result of the conflict in neighboring countries like Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia, refugees and illegal firearms were very common in Kenya and this fueled such crimes as terrorism, armed robbery, carjacking, rape, and murder. The country was very unsuited and ill prepared to face the serious level of crime and infiltration of arms that were pouring into the country. The police were highly politicized and had very serious cases of human rights violations. The country also maintained two sets of police, the national police and the administrative police, both with overlapping functions. This ambiguity between the two police forces called for police reform in Kenya.

The Kenyan police were so intrigued with the success of community policing that in a conference on gun control in Kampala in March 2002, and with mounting public pressure, the Office of the President mandated the creation of a national steering committee on community policing. In mid-2002 the police and civil society in Kenya recommended that moving toward Community-Based Policing should be prioritized, with some key issues including accountability, empowerment of local communities on safety and security issue, partnerships between the police and public, improving public confidence and trust in the police, and greater access to justice particularly for the poor and disadvantaged. The aim was to reduce crime and fear of crime through a proactive and preventive approach to policing (Saferworld, 2008).

When a new government took over in Kenya in 2003, it had a popular mandate to reform the police, and with a national consultation the government was able to determine that the people were willing to support the police and be involved in their own policing. With adoption of a Community-Based Policing it provided an avenue for reform agenda that would be based on partnership, shared responsibility, greater transparency, and accountability.

When the community policing was established in Kenya there were some challenges particularly the capacity of the various stakeholders to implement, train, and develop a national policy and strategic planning. Kenya then launched two pilot sites for the initial project. One site was Kibera, which is one of the worst and largest slums in Africa. The unprecendented amount of poverty in Kibera often forces youth to engage in petty crimes to supplement their household’s income.

In Kibera the aim of the Community-Based Policing was to reclaim peace and security for its residents and reduce the proliferation of small arms by building trust between the police and the local communities. The police detailed that the primary factor fueling crime in Kibera as poverty, a lack of employment opportunities, the breakdown of social relations, and danger related to poor living conditions (Saferworld, 2008). The Community-Based Policing responded through a range of activities focused on crime prevention and victim support. The achievement of the Community-Based Policing was very encouraging and included but not limited to:

- The sharing of information between communities and police officers has helped police take action to prevent crime and insecurity. Information boxes called “Toa Habarikwapolsi” (volunteering information to the police) allow individuals to pass information confidentially to police officers to prevent and reduce crime.

- The Community-Based Policing forum gave the community an opportunity to develop and implement initiatives to improve safety such as building gates and perimeter fences around certain estates and sealing estate corridors to track the entry and exit of individuals into the neighborhood.

- The Community-Based Policing program gave citizens in Kibera greater confidence to openly discuss the safety and security issues that confront them in their day-to-day lives. Awareness—raising activities have empowered local communities to demand more support from their local political representatives (Saferworld, 2008).

The cooperation among the stakeholders in the Kibera community is one of the main reasons that community-based policing has succeeded in this part of Kenya. The police, the business community, the provincial administration, all developed a solid partnership for the success of the program. The police with the cooperation of the community feel better equipped for crime prevention.

The other pilot site for the Communiuty-Based Policing project was Isiolo. This area has a very high level of unemployment, drug abuse among the youth, a high rate of prostitution, and is described as the armed supermarket of Kenya because of its location at the gateway border of Ethiopia and Somalia where most illegal arms are smuggled into Kenya. The crime problem led to the closure of many schools in Isiolo, businesses were forced to relocate, and cattle rustling was very common. Cattle rustling had a devastating effect because the possession of cattle defines status.

A handful of organizations like and local communities, the police, Arid Land Resources Management Project, District Peace Committee, PeaceNet, and Saferworld came together to develop community-based policing, and the result was equally very encouraging just like in Kibera. The achievements were but not limited to:

- An increase in the number of incidents reported to the police and dealt with. As the public felt more confident to report criminal incidents, the police were able to deal more effectively with these cases and provide feedback to the community on the steps taken and progress made.

- More people handed over their illegal small arms to the Peace Building and Conflict Management Office, which works closely with the Community-Based Policing Steering Committee. This is managed by community representatives who transfer the guns to Kenya Police officers for sale.

- The Kenya Police have opened a customer-care office in Isiolo so that people can access information relating to their security needs.

- Members of the community and police carry out joint patrol activities in Bulla-Pesa.

- Initiatives to get young people involved in Community-Based Policing activities have been organized enabling them to a play key role in bringing about safety for their communities.

- Business is once again flourishing in Bulla-Pesa. There are now five banks operating in the area, all of which had previously closed down or relocated due to the problem of insecurity. Furthermore, whereas shops in Bulla-Pesa were previously forced to close before 6 p.m. because of insecurity, they are now open until 9 p.m. (Saferworld, 2008).

The case of Kenya highlights the difficulties that the colonial boundaries imposed on Africa pose for community policing. Whereas the masses of Africans are mobile, crisscrossing the artificial colonial boundaries, and while terrorists and violent criminals cross borders at will, the police are expected to stop enforcing the law at the postcolonial national boundaries. We recommend the visions of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, and Maumar Gaddafi for a union government that would erase those divisive colonial boundaries and allow Africans to build the beloved community across Africa. For instance, Somali refugees have lived in Kenya for more than forty years and still they have no citizenship rights in Kenya.

South Africa

With the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa an urgent need to dismantle the apartheid police was among one of the expectations of the people of South Africa. However, the apartheid state tried to sabotage peace by orchestrating the third force that was suspected to be behind the mass violence between the Inkatha Freedom Party members and supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) before democratic elections. The crime rate in South Africa continued to be a major issue especially in black communities where the murder rate is higher than in white neighborhoods. Unemployment, poor housing, and poor education are problems in South Africa; and immigrants from other African countries are often attacked by xenophobes who blame immigrants for taking jobs away from poor South Africans and for taking their women as wives while their languages were said to sound incomprehensibly like makwerekwere, slang for foreigners in South Africa.

The legitimization of violence associated with political causes and the view of violence as an acceptable means of resolving social, political, and domestic conflicts have also given rise to a repressive police culture of violence in South Africa, which is aggravated and perhaps caused by the South African history of the authoritarian and oppressive application of police force to maintain apartheid (Interdepartmental Strategy Team, 1995). The vicious political violence that engulfed the country after the unbanning of the liberation movement in 1990 gave rise to South Africa’s community policing. The Peace Accord signed between the government, the ANC, and Inkatha stated the following:

The police shall endeavor to protect the people of South Africa from all criminal acts and shall do so in a rigorously non-partisan fashion, regardless of the political belief and affiliation, race, religion, gender or ethnic origin of the perpetrators or victim of such acts…. The police shall be guided by the belief that they are accountable to society in rendering their policing services and shall therefore conduct themselves so as to secure and retain the approval of the public. Through such accountability and friendly, effective and prompt service, the police shall endeavor to obtain the co-operation of the public whose partnership in the task of crime control and prevention is essential (National Peace Accord, 1991).

The five core elements of community policing in South Africa were defined as (Pelser, 1999):

- Service orientation: the provision of a professional policing service, responsive to community needs and accountable for addressing these needs.

- Partnership: the facilitation of a cooperative, consultative process of problem solving.

- Problem-solving: the joint identification and analysis of causes of crime and conflict and the development of innovative measures to address these.

- Empowerment: the creation of joint responsibility and capacity for addressing crime.

- Accountability: the creation of a culture of accountability for addressing the needs and concerns of communities. This was outlined primarily in terms of the functions of various structure like the national and provisional secretariats, the independent complaints directorate and members of the provisional legislatures responsible for safety and security.

Some experts believe that community policing has been a failure in South Africa because the model does not work with countries that are struggling with basic governance. With one of the highest crime rates in the world, South Africa needed every mechanism possible to reduce its crime rate. One important aspect of policing in South Africa is that it has gone through some changes since 1994 in terms of organization and democratization. It went from a militarized force, to autocratic and bureaucratic, to what is known as a service model characterized by participation and problem solving. But the mass killing of striking mine workers at Marikana in August 2012 indicated that the militarized policing of impoverished Africans in the interest of the capitalist class was still the norm.

The Roodekran Neighborhood Watch and community policing experienced a lot of success the first three years of its establishment, including:

- establishing a dedicated and well-structured management committee consisting of twenty members occupying different portfolios;

- establishing and maintaining a website with key information about crime prevention (www.roodekranswatch.org);

- maintaining and strengthening their relationship with the police, security companies, and local organizations such as churches, as well as the business community;

- increasing the number of street sheriffs to 122;

- providing regular convoy patrols with the police and security companies in order to create mass visibility in a highly organized anti-crime campaign; and

- creating the Business Watch to mobilize the business community in the campaign against crime and incorporate businesses into a membership structure (Meyer et al., 2011).

*****

Community policing is not one size fits all. In defining community we must bear in mind that it includes a group of people living in the same area with the same history and understanding of themselves, that they have some common interests and common-specific areas served by the police. Communities have a sense of belonging, sense of value or sometimes identify with a hometown. From our studies it can be concluded that a department-wide use of community policing can achieve a number of results, including: considerable reduction in crime and disorder, improvement in the quality of life for residents, more positive attitudes toward the police, and the prevention and reduction of the fear of crime. It also improves police-community relations, increases the flow of information between the police and the community, and increases the level of work satisfaction for most police officers.

We commend the government of South Africa for legalizing dagga, or marijuana, instead of using it as an excuse to keep sending lots of young Africans to prison for a substance that is safer than tobacco and alcohol. Other African countries should follow this example instead of sheepishly following the war on drugs imposed by the West. South Africa has also led by abolishing the death penalty, legalizing same-sex relations, and including land reform in the democratic constitution. A United Republic of African States should follow suit in order to build the Ubuntu of Desmond Tutu.

5

Community Policing Implementation Issues

Our focus in this chapter is on the implementation of community policing. With the general increase in crime around the world, public officials in most societies herald community policing as the long-awaited solution to the problem. In Nigeria, the government and community leaders are beginning to recognize that the National Police, as currently conceptualized, simply cannot handle the challenge alone. There can never be enough police officers to monitor all of the potential sources of crime that occur everyday within Nigeria. They also must accept responsibility for keeping their neighborhoods safe. The implementation of community policing (CP) necessitates fundamental changes in the structure and management of police organizations. Implementing CP raises a host of complex issues. What structural changes are necessary? Can the current police personnel be changed, or do we need to recruit new people? Do we have enough external support? Do communities have sufficient capacity to engage with the police? Can communities develop partnerships with the police? Who takes the lead in this process, the community or the police?

Understanding Community Policing

It is important to be clear about what we mean when we talk about community policing. Community policing refers to a philosophical position about the role and functions of the police. It demands that the goals of policing, the conditions that it addresses, the means used to address them, and assessments of police success, should be developed and formulated with reference to the distinctive, experiences and special structures of local communities (Weisburd and McElroy, 1988). As defined by the Community Policing Consortium, CP consists of two core components: community partnership and problem solving (US Department of Justice, 1994). Community-oriented policing recognizes that community problems require community-engaged solutions and support. Accordingly, the phrase “community-oriented policing” as per Security Council Resolution 2185 (2014) is defined as: “a strategy for encouraging the public to act as partners with the police in preventing and managing crime as well as other aspects of security and order based on the needs of the community” (UN Peace Operations, 2018: 6). Skogan (2006), defines CP as an organizational strategy whose primary elements are citizen involvement, problem solving, and decentralization. Efforts have been made to create a much more comprehensive definition of CP by Scheider et al. (2009: 697) as: “a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues, such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime.”

From the definitions one can distill the core common principles of the CP philosophy. These include: community mobilization, problem-solving, partnerships, and organizational transformation.

Community

When the term “community” is used, the first notion that typically comes to mind is a place in which people know and care for one another the kind and place where people do not merely ask, “How are you?” as a formality, but they care about the answer (Etzioni, 1993: 31); but the term has a variety of meanings. Generally, a community is conceived of as a group of people occupying the same geographical area by which they can identify themselves and in which a degree of solidarity exists (McNall and McNall, 1992: 179). Thus, it is about both territorial settlement and social relationships (Palmioto, 2011). From a geographical perspective, community is used to identify local, small geographical units with communal relationships, such as villages, towns, or neighborhoods (Gusfield, 1975:32–33). In Africa, the town villages and autonomous communities (as in the villages in the South East states of Nigeria) fit neatly into this category. This is a rural community. But community can also be used to describe larger units, such as whole cities as in the urban areas/cities of Africa. This is an urban community.

A rural community consists of a group of families living on contiguous land who generally think of themselves as living in the same locality, to which they give a name, and who interact with one another through visiting, borrowing, exchanging services, or participating in social activities (Palmioto, 2011). These common activities include schools, places of worship, businesses, and such. The urban community usually consists of a larger group (than the rural community) of people living in a small geographical area who have their own local government and carry on various economic enterprises. Urban communities are generally more heterogeneous. The dynamics of the urban community to a large extent are different from the rural communities, so the CP strategies will be different.

One of the basic arguments of this chapter is that for community policing to be a success, there must exist a sense of community. The officers involved in CP must understand, and more important, strive to create and reinforce a sense of community. This is “a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (McMillan and Chavis, 1986: 9). There must also be community empowerment for CP to be successful. This is “the process by which people organize, attain a collective objective, and learn about their own personal power” (Heskin, 1991: 63). An empowered community is structured in such a way that members have the opportunity to participate in local activities while being responsible to other members of the community (Heskin, 1991:64). For CP to be successfully implemented in Africa, it is essential to start the process at the local level (families and neighborhoods) and then gradually expand it to encompass larger and larger units, from local villages and towns to the states and national government.

Problem Solving

Problem solving is an analytic approach for systematically identifying community problems, collecting and analyzing information about the problems, developing and implementing responses that have the potential to eliminate or reduce problems, and evaluating the responses to determine their effectiveness (Scheider et al., 2009). Problem solving involves going beyond traditional police responses to crime to proactively addressing problems that are of concern to communities. Problem solving assumes that crime and disorder can be reduced in small geographic areas by carefully studying the characteristics of problems in the area and then applying the appropriate resources (US Department of Justice, 1994).

Advocates of CP have stressed that the very nature of police work must be altered from its present incident-by-incident, case-by-case orientation to one that is more problem oriented (Goldstein, 1990). While not ignoring the traditional case-by case approach, whenever possible, attention should be directed toward underlying problems and conditions. Following the medical analogy, policing should address causes as well as symptoms, and should adopt the epidemiological public health approach as well as the individual doctor’s clinical approach (Cordner, 1995).

The problem-solving process consists of four steps: a careful identification of the problem, a careful analysis of the problem, a search for alternative solutions to the problem, and an implementation and assessment of a response to the problem. Determining the underlying causes of crime depends to a great extent on an in-depth knowledge of community. The incorporation of community inputs will be crucial in all the steps of the process. Analysis is the heart of the problem-solving process. The objectives of the analysis are to develop an understanding of the dynamics of the problem and develop an understanding of cause and effect. As part of the analysis phase, it is important to find out as much as possible about each aspect of the crime triangle by asking, who, what, when, where, how, why, and why not about the victim, offender, and crime location (Spelman and Eck, 1989).

Partnerships

Most of the explanations of CP share the idea that the police should engage others in their efforts. CP encourages law enforcement agencies to have multidisciplinary partnerships with government agencies, community members and groups, service providers, private businesses, and the media (Scheider, et al., 2009). Participation of the community in its own protection is one of the central elements of CP (US Department Justice, 1994). We will argue in this chapter that communities take the lead in this partnership building and not the police. Most communities in Africa used to maintain law and order by themselves before they were colonized. For example, the Igbo society of the South Eastern States of Nigeria had villages and communities that were completely self-governing, which included maintaining law and order. How communities maintained law and order without the police could be an asset and input in the planning and implementation of CP. Effective community partnerships and problem solving will require the mastery of new responsibilities and the adoption of a flexible style of management that is explained below.

Organizational Transformation

Policing, like other occupations, has developed a unique culture. There is no question that when people work together for any length of time, they generate patterns of thinking, behaving, and feeling. The development of a unique understanding of the world and shared values and behavioral norms separate occupational members from nonmembers, which means that police and citizens will inevitably see things differently. To reconcile these different worldviews, what is needed is a fundamental transformation of police management, structure, personnel, and information systems to institutionalize community partnerships and proactive problem-solving efforts (Scheider et al., 2009).

The traditional police organizational structure seems more suited to routine, bureaucratic work than to the discretion and creativity required for CP. Three important organizational transformation elements of CP are structure, management, and information. The types of restructuring suited for CP include: decentralization, flattening the layers of hierarchy, and getting the police and community members to work in teams. Under CP, command will no longer be centralized, and many decisions will come from the bottom (communities) instead of from the top down. This transformation in command structure is very crucial to the creation of meaningful and productive ties between the community and the police.

The transition to CP requires recognizing that the new responsibilities and decision-making power of the communities and the community police officers must be supported, guided, and encouraged by the entire organization. There is the need for detailed information based on communities as the unit of analysis. The emphasis on problem solving highlights the need for information systems that aid in identifying and analyzing community-level problems.

Implementing Community-Oriented Policing

Nigeria ’s Experiences in I mplementing Community Policing

The idea of community policing is not new to Nigeria. The country has some experiences in implementing CP. The British Department of International Development (DFID) in 2003, through its Security, Justice, and Growth (SJG) program, sent seven police officers on a study tour to the United Kingdom to examine examples of CP. Similarly, the MacArthur Foundation facilitated more study tours to study CP in the Houston Police Department in the United States. Police officers who participated in these study tours formed the Community Policing Project Team. (Iwar, 2010) The Project Team developed the Community Policing Project Plan with the following two aims:

1. To facilitate the development of community policing throughout Nigeria.

2. To examine the policies, strategies, structures, and organization of the Nigerian Police, to ensure that the applicable principles and core values of community policing are enshrined in the professional performance, ethics, and codes of conduct of the Nigerian Police.

The Project Plan consisted of the following six interrelated elements that formed the basis for the implementation strategy:

- Manage and deliver an awareness, sensitization, and information sharing campaign on CP.

- Implement CP training for officers in the states.

- Examine and develop the current training and development function.

- Examine and develop current organizational structures to drive CP.

- Develop an intelligence-led policing style, including new technology and science.

- Examine laws, police processes, and procedures.

The Community Policing Project was launched in Enugu State in April 2004 by the then secretary to the federal government and the inspector general of police (IGP). The project team achieved the followings:

- Organized multirank sensitization workshops for five thousand police personnel at federal and state levels.

- Trained about fifty community policing developers (CPDs).

- CPD officers worked directly with the police divisions in Enugu State to develop attitudes and behaviors that will enable positive outcomes within the police and communities.

Further specific achievements include:

- The establishment of a Community Policing Office within the “F” Department at Headquarters and replication of that in all State Commands.

- All State Commands have functional Community Policing Offices staffed with trained and experienced personnel, supporting and assisting in the development of various aspects of community policing principles, particularly partnerships, problem solving, and intelligence-led policing.

- At the divisional level, the concept of neighborhood policing with Dedicated Policing Teams (DPT) to manage microbeats has been introduced with the following personnel structures: (a) community policing developers (CPD); (b) community safety officers (CSP); (c) human rights officers (HRO); (d) community policing officers (CPO); (e) neighborhood watch support officers (NWSO); (f) divisional intelligence officers (DIO) and; (g) conflict resolution officers (CRO) (Iwar, 2010).

The implementation of CP in Nigeria had the support of top politicians. Following an assessment of the program in Enugu State, the then IGP approved an extension of the community policing pilot to cover five more states: Benue, Jigawa, Kano, Ondo, and Ogun. A report by Stone et al., (2005) stated that Nigeria offers good examples of what has been possible to accomplish in the safety and justice sectors in a situation where “conflict and violence in various forms are a fact of life.” How successful the implementation of CP in Nigeria has been so far will be a very good study. Considering the rapid increase in crime in Nigeria, one could argue that the efforts to implement CP in Nigeria was bedeviled by economic and institutional contexts that resulted in a considerable lack of resources and a fundamental lack of trust by communities. To effectively implement CP in Nigeria will require putting in place institutions and practices that support democratic policing.

Creating Facilitating Institutions or Structures

There are two main aspects of CP: CP that is directed by the communities and supported by the police and CP led and directed by the police and supported by the communities. It is still not clear which strand will be implemented in Nigeria. Communities in Nigeria differ from one another. Some communities have national police posts, while others do not have a full police presence. The choice of which aspect a community will choose will vary because some communities are rural, and the others are urban. However, what is common and fundamental to both aspects is that the goals of policing, and the conditions that they will address, should be developed and formulated with reference to the distinctive mores, experiences, and special structures of local communities.

It is important to note that in Nigeria and many African countries, it could be argued that policing never left the community in the sense that self-policing continues to be a fact of life in societies that cannot rely on the national public police. The capacity to provide a well-resourced, twenty-four-hour policing service for all members of a community is restricted to the world’s richest countries. Those living in the poor countries like Nigeria may have to simply get by with semblance of indigenous or traditional processes of justice that are still functioning, but with some limitations. The contrast between CP approaches in rich countries and poor developing countries may be that in the rich countries, they are focused on the police searching for community, while in the poor countries it is the community in search of policing (Wisler and Onwudiwe, 2009).

Efforts to introduce CP in poor countries frequently run into difficulties. Policing in these countries is bedeviled by weak economic and institutional contexts that result in a considerable lack of resources for policing and a fundamental lack of trust by communities. Most people in Nigeria tend to run away at the sight of a policeman. The Yoruba’s of South West Nigeria call the police olopa (meaning go and kill). Such perceptions that emanated from the activities of the colonial police will need to be eradicated to build harmony and trust between communities and the police. The implementation of CP in Nigeria could follow the following phases: (a) establishing civil guard units in all villages and urban areas; (b) establishing community-policing units in all local government headquarters; and (c) establishing a police-community bureau in the state capitals.

Civil Guard Units/Village Police

A central idea of CP is that the community plays an important role in defining the problems the police are to address and the strategies they should use. The national police in many African countries have demonstrated that they are incapable of maintaining peace and order in the society. Most communities have resorted to creating civil guards. They are called various names in Nigerian states. Some call it forest guards or village police. The civil guard includes volunteers from all walks of life including the unemployed youth in the communities, retired police officers, and village artisans. The role of the civil guard is to help organize community/neighborhood crime prevention and to observe and collect data on neighborhood problems and groups that might cause crime and disorder. These are informal security institutions that can be formalized by working out operational linkages with the national police. It will also be important to agree on the incentives to sustain these units. It is envisaged that the civil guards should be managed by the village government or chiefs.

Community-Policing Units

Community policing requires a localized element to policing and close interactions between the police and public about policing priorities. To achieve this, there is a need to establish community- policing units in all the local government headquarters in a state. The responsibilities of the community-policing unit will include: training police officers and members of the civil guards on strategies for maintaining law and order; assisting civil guards in developing village security plans; and creating an organizational culture that would support community policing within the national police.

Police Community Bureau/Community Police Advisory Commission

The Police Community Bureau could be established in each state capital of the federation. Its main functions are: building the capacities of the community-policing units; develop training programs and organizational mechanisms to enhance cooperation between the police, groups, and organizations in the broader community; and maintain an oversight of the practices by community-policing units and the civil guard units.

Planning the Implementation of Community Policing

The implementation of a community-policing strategy is a complex process that requires planning and managing for change (US Department of Justice, 1994). Community policing cannot be established through a mere modification of existing policy; profound changes must occur at every level in the community and the police agency. Before CP can be implemented to any degree, a plan must be established to address the needs of the communities and the police agencies.

Community and Police Agency Capacity Assessments

A crucial step in planning and implementing CP is assessing the fit between core strategies and local conditions both in the police and communities (United Nations, 2018). Although every community has different traditions and capacities, several are fundamentally important to the practice of community-oriented policing anywhere. These factors fall into two primary categories:

1. The nature, sensitivities, and capacities of the communities with which the police must work; and

2. The capacity and capabilities of the police to be responsive, consultative, mobilizing, and problem solving.

Strategic Joint Planning by Communities and the Police

A well thought out strategic plan of five years should be jointly prepared by communities and community-policing units, and then it should be coordinated by the Community Policing Bureau. One main question is how far ahead and how extensively should planning a CP program take before putting it into operation. (US Department of Justice, 1994) outlined three possible approaches.

1. Plan, then implement. This method entails developing a detailed long-range plan with tasks and timelines delineated.

2. Plan and implement. In this approach, planning and action occur simultaneously. While the planning continues, certain aspects of CP could be implemented. The process entails learning while doing.

3. Implement with little planning. This approach goes into implementation with little or no planning. It assumes that a limited knowledge of communities will not allow for adequate planning.

Planning for community policing should be between the communities and the police agency. A strategic plan created without the involvement and blessing of the community being served and the police agency is doomed to failure. Active community members, along with persons who reflect the diversity of the community, should be made members of the strategic planning team. Women should be members of the committee. Community team members should represent the interest of school authorities, business owners, farmers, religious organizations, and others. Also, all personnel in the community-policing unit/s should be involved in planning. After setting the vision and mission of community policing, the plan should be developed guided by the following three questions:

1. Where do we want to be? This is the process of strategically setting goals.

2. Where are we now? What is the current position? What resources do we have? What limitations or barriers are we facing?

3. How do we get there from here? What policies and programs will allow us to achieve the goals (Fyfe et al., 1997: 214–15)?

Once the communities and the police have specified goals, assessed needs, resources and barriers, and specified a sequence of actions to attain goals, they must work out more details of how the plan will be implemented. The community-policing implementation plan should describe how policing activities will be monitored. Mechanisms for assessing whether the objectives of the plan are being achieved must be established from the beginning, as part of the planning process, and assessment must be a continuing process.

Sample Action Plan for Community Policing

The elements of a sample action plan for CP will include the following:

1. Assessment: Thoroughly assess the current community-oriented policing capacity of communities and the police agency. Looking at the experiences of the Nigerian Police on CP, aspects of CP are being delivered partially in compartmented siloes and the various communities organizing the youths as local vigilantes. The results of the assessment could be the baseline for measuring success.

2. Engage/persuade key stakeholders to adopt CP principles: The key stakeholders are: state government political leaders; police senior executive officers, especially the commissioner of police; and community leaders, such as chiefs, local councilors, school administrators, relevant religious leaders, and so forth.

3. Create/strengthen a multilevelimplementation task force: Community-policing implementation task forces should be created at the community, local government, state, and national levels. Community policing that requires community participation, organizational change, and sustained funding will require community support and direction at high levels of the police command. A common way of achieving this is through the creation of a task force that will articulate the demands of the communities (at the bottom) and report directly to the state governor and the state commissioner of police. Each community should nominate the members of the task force in which the chief of the village should be the head of the task force. The head of the local government should be the head of the Local Government Area task force, and the local government police chief will be the deputy or the co-chair. The heads of the community task force members should all be members of the local government task force.

4. Develop and publish a CP implementation plan: On the basis of assessments of community institutions and capacities, the task forces should formulate practices that can be implemented with a reasonable expectation of acceptance by the local police and communities.

5. Develop criteria for evaluating the performance of CP,police officers, and the village guards: The performance of officers and community/village guards assigned to CP must be evaluated. The task forces should as a matter of priority develop criteria for performance evaluation.

Issues that are likely to impact the implementation of CP can be classified into three: (a) the capacity of communities to plan, organize, and engage with the police; (b) the receptivity of the police organization to work with the communities; and (c) the governmental commitment to the CP initiative.

Capacity of Communities

The definition of CP may vary, but all share the idea that the police and the community must work together to identify problems affecting the community and to develop solutions. This is a departure from the era of traditional policing in which police claimed a monopoly of responsibility for crime control. In this new dispensation of CP, communities need to develop a partnership with the police. For this partnership to work two main things need to happen: citizens must understand the dynamics in their communities and how the police functions; and the police have to understand the inner workings of the community.

Communities also need to be empowered. Empowerment is the processes by which people organize, attain a collective objective, and learn about their own personal power (Heskin, 1991: 63). An empowered community is structured in a way that provides members with the opportunity to participate in community activities and to be responsible for the community, and its members are willing to use that structure (Heskin, 1991: 64). However, there are some issues in stimulating community involvement. These include:

1. Community members fear of retaliation by the troublemakers in the community. There are possibilities that some of the criminal elements in a community will attack community members seen to be associating with the police. The role of CP is to make community members feel safer. But, if community policing is unable to reduce fear to the degree necessary to allow community members to feel safe enough to police themselves, some aspects of traditional policing could be introduced.

2. Historically poor police-community relations. It has been generally observed that some community members do not really want closer contact with the police. The sight of the police in some communities creates apprehension. This has an historical explanation. The police as we know it now was an institution created by the colonial government to suppress the “natives.” In Nigeria, the police for more than a century (between 1861–1960) were involved in the brutal suppression of indigenous peoples (Ahire, 1991; Tamuno, 1970). Though all countries are independent now, that legacy of suppression of the so called “civilians” still persists. The Nigerian government failed to reorient the police toward embracing democratic values. The subsequent postcolonial democratic and military administrations used the police to enforce all sorts of authoritarian and anti-people laws and practices, further deepening the culture of violence that the police had inherited. For CP to work, there is a strong need to reform the police in which one of the central objectives will be among others transforming the doctrine of the African police.

3. Intragroup conflict. A common barrier to organizing CP is conflict among community leaders. This could take the form of disagreements about which issues are to be addressed and how tasks are to be delegated. It is important to note that communities are often aggregates of competing groups. Simply because people live in the same geographic area and share the same class background does not guarantee that they share all the same values or define problems the same way. This problem can be solved through the joint planning processes discussed earlier.

4. Community policing “champions.” The lack of CP champions in communities and police departments could be a problem. There is the need for key players at all levels to continue to champion its development.

Receptivity of the Police Organization

The implementation of CP will require its principles to be incorporated into the police organization. For several reasons, the police personnel tend to resist change. The early stages of implementing CP are not easy. Like any set organization it would be difficult to convince police officers to accept the new roles and behaviors required for community policing. Skolnick and Bayley (1988) identified the following obstacles to implementing CP within police departments:

1. The traditional culture of policing. This includes the defensive attitude of suspicion that officers develop to deal with the public. Because citizens can be dangerous, police may not be inclined to develop closer relations with them. There is mutual distrust between police and civilians.

2. The centralized, hierarchical, quasi militarycommand structure of traditional policing. Most countries in Africa, such as Nigeria, have nationally run police agencies. Community policing requires a decentralization of authority and a reorganization of the command structure to give lower-level officers more flexibility and initiative and to increase bottom-up communication.

Governmental Commitment to the Community-Policing Initiative

There needs to be a clear commitment from the most senior levels of government and policing to community-policing reform processes, to other measures that increase police accountability, and to firm action on key contextual issues such as corruption, human rights abuses, and excessive use of force by the police. Some of the indicators on political will and commitment are:

1. Lack of a national policy on CP. The lack of a strategic national policy on CP in Nigeria with guidelines, plans, and an implementation mechanism constitutes a big challenge. The lack of a national policy will create confusion as to what the concept means in practice.

2. Sufficient resources for implementing CP. The implementation of CP reform requires considerable resources for training, support, new equipment, and projects such as the redesign of police stations to make them more accessible to the public.

3. Pay, motivation,and morale of police. Police who are poorly paid and have low morale are not likely to be motivated to work with communities. Low pay may also mean that policing tends to attract poorly educated police from more marginalized sections of the society. This can result in a general lack of respect for policing as an occupation.

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In conclusion, the outlook for community policing in Nigeria is positive. All stakeholders seem to want it. Many police departments in the country have made great strides in implementing CP. The police are better educated today than at any time in the past, and we can expect this trend to continue, with training expanded to include problem solving as well as law enforcement. We can expect in the future that the community will play a larger role in community policing. Since in Nigeria, it is the community that is in search of the policing, the communities should take the lead and set the agenda. Eventually community-oriented policing will evolve into a community-oriented government.

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Conclusion

The outlook for community policing in Nigeria is positive. All stakeholders seem to want it. Many police departments in the country have made great strides to implement some form of CP. In this conclusion we look at how to move community policing in Nigeria from rhetoric to action. The increasing incidents of crime since the end of the civil war, and the military regimes that resulted, led to a proliferation of armed vigilante groups in all zones and regions. This is because the Nigerian Police cannot effectively maintain order. The inability of NPF to effectively deal with the security challenges confronting the country led some state governments to encourage villages to form local security groups, which are known by various names—Amotekun (South West zone); Forest Guard (South East zone), Shege Ka Fasa (Northern Region), and so forth. Now virtually all the states and the six political zones in Nigeria have regional/and or state-based internal security outfits. These can be transformed into community policing before they evolve into regional militias.

Community Policing versus Policing Communities

These twin concepts are particularly important to bear in mind as we formulate a new approach to CP. The two concepts look similar, but they are fundamentally different if closely examined. While CP demands close a community-police partnership, policing communities is the traditional policing model of law enforcement. Most of the experiences globally in community policing are, to say the least, mild forms of the traditional model of policing communities. The communities are at best tools in the partnership arrangement that in most cases are not sustainable. What we are advocating is community policing that is truly community led. Community policing can only occur when citizens set the agenda and take direct responsibility for guarding one another’s safety, only inviting the police when things are otherwise unmanageable.

This kind of CP, in which community members work directly with one another, had been in practice in most African communities long before colonialism. Traditional African policing methods were rooted in the community and closely interlinked with social and religious structures. The enforcement of traditional laws was carried out by community structures such as age-grades, secret societies, vocational guilds (for example, hunters, farmers, black-smiths, and such) (Arase, 2018). Through these systems of crime control, law and order was maintained, largely without the use of violence. The precolonial African society saw the task of policing as that of the entire society and policing functions were undertaken by members of the community. Just like in Nigeria and other African societies, policing in preindustrial Europe had also been a local community affair. One could argue that the art of policing has always been a communal duty. It has been observed that a common denominator among countries with the best police forces across the world is that their policing framework is community-oriented and citizen-driven (Arase, 2018).

Toward a New Approach to Community Policing in Africa

Community Initiative

It is becoming noticeably clear that the modern policing model introduced by colonial authorities are increasingly failing to deliver law and order in most African countries. Communities are now developing their local/community security outfits. Arase (2013) pointed out some local African examples.

In Kenya, faced with the challenge of cattle rustling, two villages formed a security system. They selected a commandant and an assistant and hired five police reservists. Some citizens donated vehicles and other kits while the communities contributed to pay them little stipends. The Kenyan Police established a radio connection with the reservists and daily monitored and regulated their activities. Cattle rustling declined significantly in those affected communities.

In South Sudan the Market Association in Yei arranged with the police that when any trader is arrested for any crime, he or she is handed over to the association. The association resolves the issue and reports their resolutions to the police. This arrangement has been successful in preventing the escalation of relatively low-level disputes, thereby reducing the burden on the police and the criminal justice system.

In Uganda, the Taxi Drivers Association has an agreement with the police that allows the association to police taxi and bus parks in respect of traffic offences, pickpockets, and other disputes between drivers and passengers, while exchanging criminal intelligence with the police. The police on their part, offer the association’s members training in crime control and prevention.

In Sierra Leone, some communities in the South have established mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The Bo Peace and Reconciliation movement (BPRM) is a coalition of eleven community groups working on peacebuilding, reconciliation, and crime prevention in the Bo District in partnership with the local police. Its twenty local peace monitors have resolved many conflicts such as family matters, fighting, land cases, and such. Their work has reduced communal conflict and litigation in the law courts.

In Nigeria there is a lot of local and regional security initiatives in response to increasing security challenges. For example, at the peak of the Jos (North Central Nigeria) crises, a community security arrangement was formed in which Christians were engaged to secure Muslims during Juma’at prayers, and Muslims in turn provided security for Christians during Sunday church services, all in partnership with the local police. This innovative community policing security model became extremely useful in dealing with security challenges in Plateau State. Another example is in the Northeast geopolitical zone, where youth, with the support of different components of the local community, volunteered to complement the state by forming themselves into vigilante and community defense bodies to defend their communities against terror attacks. The civilian JTF, as they are called, drew strength from their local knowledge of the population such that they can easily identify and thereby isolate strangers and locals linked to terrorism and other crimes. Yet another local and regional security initiative is in the South East geopolitical zone, where the Enugu State government established forest guards. The government provides them with vehicles, security tools, uniforms, and a salary. Since the establishment of the forest guards in Enugu, the number of security incidents has been reduced. Yet the federal security agents went to a meeting in Emene on 23 August 2020 and, according to news reports, opened fire on people who were meeting peacefully, killing dozens of them and wounding more. The families of the victims of such violent policing should be supported to sue the federal government for substantial damages as part of the efforts to encourage community policing and defund or abolish militarized policing.

Furthermore, in Nigeria, some regions have started forming regional security outfits to coordinate their responses to the increasing insecurity in the country. The South Western states of Nigeria, namely, Lagos State, Oyo State, Ogun State, Ondo State, Osun State, and Ekiti State, on 9 January 2020, established, the region’s security outfit, Operation Amotekun. In support of the outfit, all the six state governors contributed twenty vehicles. The states also procured one hundred motorcycles each, making a total of six hundred motorcycles. The operatives of the security outfit will assist police, other security agencies, and traditional rulers in combating terrorism, banditry, armed robbery, kidnapping, and help in settling herdsmen and farmers contentions in the regions. In response to the establishment of Amotekun, the Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) from Northern Nigeria formed its own regional security outfit, codenamed Shege-Ka-Fasa. The South Eastern zone seems to have adopted the forest guard model as its regional outfit.

The above cases are not examples of communities policing themselves; they are examples of state agencies and local elites arming some people in real communities to police them without much accountability to the communities. As observed, they all may yield positive results with minimal investments, but they also run the risk of being abused by politicians who may use them as armed thugs to intimidate their opponents. The democratic model of community policing through neighborhood watch, closed-circuit television cameras, peace-making committees, and nonviolent methods may be the future model of CP for Africa, which has suffered enough from armed conflicts. The first strand is a community policing that starts from the bottom (communities) and then is supported by government agencies with the long-term expectation of the work of policing being everybody’s concern.

The Americans will say “see something, say something,” but guarantees for anonymity, due process, and fairness should be emphasized. The second strand is the total remaking of the Nigerian Police officer in terms of philosophy and behavior, which entails a change in the relationship between the police and communities. This should be done very quickly before the regional security formations start colliding with the national police. Nigeria and most African countries will need police reforms that deal with three main issues: (a) making/putting community policing at the center of the Nigerian Police; (b) embarking on the full professionalization of the police; (c) shifting resources away from the militarized colonial policing models and investing more in schools and hospitals for harm reduction; and (d) training community members on scientific methods of investigation and conflict resolution.

In line with the warning of Stan Cohen against what he called “made-for-export criminology” of the sort that tries to impose on developing countries, the very methods and theories that have abjectly failed in industrialized countries to guarantee order in the places that they were designed for, talk less about alien conditions in Africa, we follow Clifford Shearing and Mike Brogden in suggesting that the West does not know best when it comes to the policing of the New South Africa. Thus, we recommend the decentering of the police when it comes to community policing. We are aware of calls for the defunding of the police arising from the use of lethal violence against African Americans just as is the case in neocolonial Africa. We subscribe to the view that “African Lives Matter” in Africa, and so the police should be discouraged from continuing to play the role of a colonial occupying army, one that is imposed to conquer and subjugate Africans to systems of unequal exchange with the rest of the world in the interest of the phantom bourgeoisie (as identified by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth and condemned by Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa). Agozino calls for the same African philosophy of nonviolence that Pepinsky advocates in Criminology as Peacemaking by stating that:

The Africana philosophy of non-violence that Gandhi claimed that he learned from the warlike Zulu… promises to be a sociologically sophisticated and methodologically validated response to the error of terror and the ire in satire. Echoing this philosophy in three speeches in 1968 about the non-violent response to the error of Jim Crow terrorism, about the terror in Vietnam and about apartheid South Africa, Martin Luther King Jr. reminded the world that we are like the descendants of a great writer who left a “World House” to be inherited by us all: we must learn to live together peacefully and in love or fight and burn the house down…. Chinua Achebe drew from his Igbo culture to identify the world house as Mbari, a miniature sculpture that is made by the entire community and with each race, gender and class represented under one roof…. Desmond Tutu used the philosophy of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity to represent the same concept of forgiveness and loving kindness as the best response to the error of terror and the ire of satire…. Sociological theory should pay attention to these original theoretical developments and move away from the navel-gazing obsession with only the ideas of dead white men especially when looking for solutions to the error of terror that is rooted in the foundation of fundamentalism in the philosophy of patriarchal imperialist white supremacy (Agozino, 2014).

The agency of African women who policed their communities nonviolently dates back to the Maroon communities during slavery and to the underground railroad of Harriet Tubman. The tradition continued during the Women’s War of 1929 against colonial taxation without representation and against warrant chiefs, during the Abeokuta women’s uprising against colonial chiefs who molested young girls in the guise of tax assessment, by Kikuyu women against forced labor in Kenya, by South African women against apartheid, by Somali women who defied clannish violence to provide feeding, healthcare, and schooling, and by Liberian women who prayed. We believe that the imposition of Western militarism over Africans for hundreds of years has relatively eroded our knowledge of the technologies of love and peacemaking, but we still retain self-efficacy in peacemaking as Ifi Amadiume stated and as Nkiru Nzegwu echoed. We advocate that this philosophy of anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-imperialist nonviolence should be taught systematically as part of the programs of community policing in Africa in pursuit of the more humane society of Angela Davis, with no racism, sexism, prisons, poverty, and no war.

Accountabilities in Community Policing

Most police formations globally are guilty of misconduct, including human rights violations, the excessive use of force, and corruption. Some of these have contributed to societal uprisings, like #BlackLivesMatter in the United States, in Egypt, and recently #EndSARS in Nigeria. The youth demonstrations against the police in Nigeria was a societal reaction against the ills in the society, but primarily against the arbitrariness of the police’s negative actions on citizens. There is no question that the Nigerian Police Force has completely lost its integrity, and if the institution is going to be effective again, the authorities will need to regain their moral authority. This will be difficult and will need major changes in police accountability.

The United Nation’s Handbook on Police Accountability Oversight,and Integrity, defined accountability as “a system of internal and external checks and balances aimed at ensuring that police perform the functions expected of them to a high standard and are held responsible if they fail to do so” (2011: 9). Accountable policing means that the police accept being questioned about their decisions and actions and accept the consequences of being found guilty of misconduct.

According to the handbook, effective police accountability requires:

1. A system in which police, the state, the public/community, and independent bodies are represented.

2. A system involving monitoring before, during, and after police operations and actions.

3. A system allowing for corrective action.

4. A system that targets individual police officers, the supervisors, and the institutions as a whole.

Elements of an effective police accountability system includes:

- Legislation in line with international human rights law specifying the functions and powers of the police.

- Opportunities for the public to voice their concerns.

- Adequate police training, both basic and ongoing.

- Proper reporting procedures and facilities.

- Adequate supervision that supports officers in carrying out their duties professionally and reporting these correctly.

- A working culture that promotes transparency and evaluation.

- Procedures for overseeing the feedback, evaluation, and complaints (United Nations, 2011: 7).

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About the Authors

Ifi Amadiume is a poet, anthropologist, and essayist. Formerly a professor of religion at Dartmouth College, she is the author of Male Daughters, Female Husbands among other works.

Kimani Nehusi is an associate professor in the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University. A multi-disciplinary scholar with special interests in language and linguistics, history, culture, and research methodology, he is the author of A People’s Political History of Guyana, 1838-1964 among other works.

EmmanuelC.Onyeozili earned his Ph.D. in criminology from Florida State University and is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. He has served as the managing editor of the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies since 2005, and he is a coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Africana Criminologies. His research interests are social control and policing, African criminology, and politics.

Biko Agozino is a professor of sociology and Africana studies at Virginia Tech and the editor-in-chief of African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. He is a coeditor of Routledge Handbook of Africana Criminologies and the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towardthe Decolonisationof Victimisation and Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason.

AugustineO.Agu is an international consultant in educational planning, administration, and social policy. He is a passionate education leader with more than thirty years of educational experience teaching, formulating, and championing educational strategies in developing countries. His career includes ten years teaching with the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and twenty-one years with UNICEF as chief of education for Somali, Tanzania, Ghana, Ethiopia, and the social policy advisor for Trinidad and Tobago. His areas of expertise include: program planning, educational strategy development, school district planning, global education policy, and national policy development. His current research interests are in the areas of boy’s underachievement in education, poverty and the well-being of children, issues of implementation, the role of universities in promoting sustainable development, and the use of restorative practices for school discipline.

Patrick Ibe is chair of the Criminal Justice Department at Albany State University. His scholarship interests include criminal justice, corrections and profiling, the protection of women against violence, and political science. He has authored many peer-reviewed journal articles and made presentations on criminal justice issues at numerous academic conferences, including the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Criminal Justice Association of Georgia, where he also serves on the advisory board. Ibe serves as a reviewer for African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies and as vice president of Albany Second Chance (a nonprofit organization focusing on the societal reintegration of ex-convicts). He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Southern University in New Orleans, a master’s degree in criminal justice from Atlanta University, and a doctorate in political science from Clark Atlanta University.