Special constabulary? Think again

It would seem that the federal government is at last rousing itself over the much talked about community policing. There is some motion, if a confused movement, on that front right now. The inspector-general of police, Mohammed Abubakar Adamu, according to The Punch of January 26, had directed state “commissioners of police, traditional rulers and others to form screening committees” to recruit special constables for the job.

The federal government’s directive to the IG is to recruit 50 volunteers from each of the 774 local government areas in the country. An impressive number, if you work out the mathematics, it should boost the strength of the police, except that the special constables would wear police uniform but would not be police men and women. The first faux pas is the quota system by treating the local governments as equal in their community policing needs. Their community policing differ. This ought to have been taken into consideration so the number of personnel allocated to each state would be on the basis of need, not on the equality of local governments. The level of insecurity facing the nation is too serious for the authorities to waste human resources on the cosmetics of the quota system. But this is the least of my worries about the community policing system as conceived and ready for implementation.

From what has been put out so far, it is clear that the concept of community policing still suffers from the cancer of poor conceptualization on the part of the police and federal authorities. More work needs to be done to ensure that the nation and its people fully understand the concept and what difference it would make in the security of their lives and property. The IG’s order smacks of a panic reaction to perhaps prevent other geo-political zones planning their own Amotekun from doing so.

I thought we were talking of a second tier of policing as an alternative to state police. We thought community policing would be part of the duties of the Nigeria Police Force whose personnel would be posted to carry out community policing duties. The special constabulary just does not fit the bill. It is a volunteer outfit without a formal command and operational structure. Its personnel are not trained men and women able to assist the regular police. The concept of the community police we see now is different from what we thought it would be.

From what I knew of the special constabulary in the defunct Northern Region, the volunteer civil servants worked only in the evenings to assist the regular police maintain some degree of police presence in the townships. They were not required to do more to scare petty thieves. We had only petty criminals then; no violent criminals armed to the teeth with the latest guns from the gun factories in Europe and the United States of America.

The volunteers had regular jobs and were happy to give their evening freely to this duty because they rightly saw it as a citizens’ civic duty to the community. The regional governments at the time did not face the level of insecurity we face today. To fall back on what worked then and hope it would work now is naïve.  How can the untrained men and women make us more secure when the regular police force and other security forces, trained and equipped to prevent crimes and maintain law and order, are having a tough time coping with the high level of insecurity right now?

One thing for sure: the police authorities would not lack a huge army of volunteers. They would pour in from every local government area. Most people would volunteer because it is a job and given the high rate of unemployment in the country, any job would do. There are obvious implications in putting the police uniform on a large army of unemployed volunteers and what they would eventually do with their uniform. It is not difficult to see that it would be their meal ticket. The public would be in for rough times in the hands of legitimately uniformed extortioners. This would clearly compound our complicated security situation; in case you need to be reminded that we are victims of police extortion daily. “Wetin you carry” is not an innocent question.

There is something pathetic about the fact that we are going to all this trouble to show that we can do without state police as the most logical second tier of policing in the country. The federal and police authorities are fighting a losing battle to prevent something whose time has come. With Amotekun, we have moved from state police to zonal police in spite of the federal opposition.

I am tempted to refer to the recommendations of a four-man AFRC Committee on Internal Security appointed by the Babangida administration in September 1988 as part of that government’s efforts to make the police force more efficient and more result-oriented. It was chaired by Vice-Admiral Murtala Nyako. It recommended a radical decentralization of the Nigeria Police Force in a manner that would give clear responsibilities to the states and the local governments in maintaining law and order and making the country safe.

I think some of its findings, observations and recommendations should be of more than passing interest to the federal and police authorities. I do not have enough space to discuss them here but it is worth noting that the committee recommended state police affairs councils at federal, state and local levels. The state police and local police commands would each be headed by a chief of police with clearly defined responsibilities in the core areas of crime containment and prevention. A police affairs council in each state would “direct the chief of police on all matters of maintenance of law and order” and see to the disbursement of funds and the welfare of the police personnel.

From what I have read of the report and the recommendations, I believe that if the AFRC had accepted and implemented them, we would not be in this deep mess today and no one who is serious about tackling the cocktail of insecurity challenges would even think of something as patently ineffective as the special constabulary as a modified second tier of policing in the country.