Is community partnership the same as community policing?

The nomenclature has been variously abused. People, especially the elite, use it when they want to rationalise what good policing and responsive policing is all about. We will make sure that we will do community policing. If you asked them to conceptualise it, they won’t be able to give you the answer. What he is talking about is why can’t you allow the people to police their security space? It can be likened to what was obtainable in pre-colonial says where groups such as age group, masquerade groups etc were involved in some form of policing or the other. For example, If you reach one village and you tell them you want to get married, they would first carry out some form of profiling on you and your family. If they found out that you used to steal goats or found you wanting in certain aspects, they would quickly sound the alarm bell. The age group people also know deviants. It is like asking the people to be involved in internal security management.

In your maiden address, you spoke extensively about deploying technology in fighting crime. With the state of the economy, how do you intend to actualise that?

I will give you an example. I have done it before. I set up all the intelligence laboratories in the police force. The intelligence department has become moribund after about 38 years of the extraction of the NSA to form what you now know as the nucleus of the DSS. Since then, we have not been able to replace a department to drive policing through predictive concepts and it took us just about two years to redirect what intelligence was all about—-crime analyses, ability to train the officers to know that they can always ascertain the trend and patterns of crime, crime mapping in their various states and commands.

For instance, as I sit here, with the intelligence department that we set up two years ago, we can give you statistics of kidnap cases in the country in one week, month, weeks or in one year. We can give you statistics of manpower wastages and operational losses. We can geo-locate and tell you where crimes are prevalent. What are the typologies of crimes that are prevalent in those areas? All those things are things that can be done. And what do we do? Simple enough, when you talk about technology, you think about warehousing a big building like this with heavy machines. It is not so. It is about thinking outside the box. We decided to setup intelligence lab. We got a server, computer systems, we trained the men, gave them phones and put them on Skype. So, all my information collectors in all the states of the federation, once they get information they send it to me.

It hits my intelligence lab and the analysts who are there start drawing the graphs and putting it in intelligible forms. So when you talk about technology, it is not about technology driving itself. It is about the mindset of officers who are going to operate the system. If crime has become scientific and technological, the response to it and officers who are supposed to respond to it should also be mentally mobile. There should be situations where they should be able to think outside the box. So, in that technology, these things are all simple. We migrated from finger printing to automated system where we can easily generate your character certificate. What does it cost us? A laptop, camcorder and biometric device. So I said, how many cases do they report in the Force CID on a daily and weekly basis? Because when I came, I said you are not going to investigate land cases, commercial transactions, civil cases.

Those are the areas you pick people and lock them up and the other person is somewhere demolishing someone’s house, especially in Lagos and Benin, where I come from. Reform is always something that people react to negatively. The men that were there went haywire. Those technologies are there. It is not something that you conjure from the moon. The small technologies you need to perform as a policeman are things that are easy to access.

We all know that roadblocks are reoccurring decimals, how do you intend to address this?

I have already cleared them. I have dismantled them. I have set up a task force with 12 vehicles. I have deployed them. They are going to be in the six geo-political zones that are co-terminus to the ones that are being supervised by the various DIGs and all I have asked them to do is a very simple task. I pay your bill, give you money, give you vehicle, fuel it, you go there. Wherever you see those roadblocks, remove it from the highway, note where it is and I will hold the Commissioner of Police and the Area Commander including the Divisional Police Officer responsible. Secondly, they are supposed to go to the cells to see when those who are kept in the cells were arrested, on what offence and how long have they been there? Do they meet the prosecutorial standards of keeping those people in our facilities? Those are the things we have rolled out. We don’t intend to harass any policemen on the highway but you just have to say these things are points of corruption. It is intolerable; it is an inconvenience and nuisance to members of the public. But then, we are not saying we are going to leave the public space vacant.

We have the Federal High Way Patrols, which the state commissioners are supposed to oversee. Wherever the roadblocks are supposed to be, the federal highway patrols are supposed to be there. So, in case of distress, the vacuum that has been created, if there is any, by the removal of those roadblocks. We have vehicles for all stakeholders and I have also asked all state commanders to give me where those vehicles are located. If they tell me where the vehicles are located, if there is any serious crime on that highway, I will hold the commissioners responsible because you cannot say you just removed those roadblocks. It is our statutory responsibility to police the public space. So that is one thing I think we have to understand. To remove the roadblocks does not mean we are not getting the policing right. Secondly and most importantly, there are times where we could do some staggered checks.

If for instance they stole a vehicle in Ilorin, Kwara state, and they radio and said the vehicle is heading towards Abaji, we can lock down the highway. On the highway, we look for that specific vehicle said to have been stolen. So once we recover it, we ease out. They are strategies. The strategies are not too strict. They are flexible. They are internal security management strategies. Just as I have said, it is about capacity. It is about my men understanding the tenets of modern policing so that they will be able to key in into the reforms we are trying to bring in.