My Plans For The Police —Soloman Arase

Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, recently spoke to journalists in Abuja on his plans for the Police What hope do Nigerians have that the Police will be better with you as IGP? I have come in as a very defining moment in our national life. I know that the expectations are high. I have been in the system for quite some time too and in strategic positions in the force. In personnel, you first take a look at our personnel profile. We warehouse the best you can have in the system. But, what we have not been able to do over the years is for us to build on the capacity of our officers. So, one of the areas where I am very interested in is trying to delegate our needs assessments, look at areas that we need to concentrate on and give my officers purposeful training that will make them perform in those offices. Such departments may be administration, operations, investigations or intelligence. Whichever of those areas we look at, we should be able to develop the capacity of the officers to be able to develop on their statutory mandates. The other area is public perception of the Nigeria Police Force. We have a negative public perception, whether rightly or wrongly. Perceptions, I must say, are often subjective. At the same time, there are certain things that members of the public would expect the policeman to do. They will not want a police officer to be corrupt; they will want him to be civil, polite, and to treat Nigerians with respect. Nigerians naturally expect the police to give them the needed respect since the tax payers’ money is invested on the police. They will demand a lot from you and at the same time, we will see how we can connect to the community. This is because there is no police force in the world that can perform without information from members of the community. So, you must be able to win the confidence of the community for you to get that information. We are working to gain the public confidence in information management especially in areas where the public think that whatever information that is given to the police would be divulged. It is going to be a two way thing. This is your police force. You cannot bring any police force from any other part of the world. [caption id="attachment_24343" align="alignleft" width="300"] •Solomon Arase, Police IG[/caption] Globally, if you look at policing in advanced countries like in Europe, America and Britain, they have gone through this same process of re-modelling themselves. It is not a one-fixe thing. And so, members of the public should also learn to be very patient with the police force. I will give you an example: a murder case occurred and Nigerians are very anxious for the police to get a result. They don’t take into consideration the limitations that the Nigeria Police Force is working with. When you talk about the professionalism of the average policeman, it is not enough for him to be able to confront those issues he is dealing with if there is no technical platform to back it up. If you go through Central London twice in a period of four hours, you are captured within the system. So, in case anything happens, it is just to focus on that particular movement. That is why the Metropolitan Police Force has a 90 per cent success rate in terms of homicide cases. You cannot do it and escape the eagle eye of their surveillance system. Those are the issues we are dealing with. Intelligence is key in policing. What then are your expectations on the issue of applying intelligence in fighting crime? I do not want a situation where people are detained unnecessarily. I expect that my policemen should be sufficiently trained enough to be able to gather evidential proof about those cases. Bank fraud is a ready example. There are cases where you can get records from the bank, corporate affairs. You assemble these things before you invite whosoever you think you have to invit. That way, you limit the pre-trial detention period that suspects would have to stay in our facilities. That is one area where we really have to work on because, if you invite someone because you said he has committed an offence,, you keep him in custody, then you start looking for evidence. The period you have kept him there will be very long and the relations start asking for bail. When they start asking for bail, the corruption circle is completed. To grant that bail, you start putting conditions here and there and in the final analysis, money changes hands. Those areas where I know are capable of exposing my officers to corruption; I want to remove them from the system. I have already directed that on no account should anybody be detained at a police station where you don’t have sufficient evidence to confront the person. Within 48 hours, you should be able to make up your mind if the truth is being told or you are able to keep the person in custody. Do you have enough policemen to police 170 million Nigerians and equipment to do the job effectively? You can never have sufficient policemen to police 170 million Nigerians. People always talk about this United Nations ratio. Even that one, you can only situate it against societies that already have good technical platforms. The United Kingdom is an example. We do not have a technical platform. What people try to do now is visibility policing. You position your men in strategic points so you create that psychological reassurance that the society is being policed. In Abuja, for example, instead of dotting the streets with police officers, you can position them strategically so that anywhere you go, by the time you are driving from Shehu Shagari Way to the other junction, you see them by the way. It does not presuppose that you have sufficient manpower. No. there is no police organisation in the world that will ever say they have sufficient manpower. That is why community partnerships in policing is very important in internal security management.This is because, if you are able to win the confidence of the community, half of your job is done. Somebody picks a phone, sees someone who has parked for a long period in a lonely street or somewhere, and called the nearest police officer. That person can easily go there and verify. But, here in Nigeria, there are some of us who don’t care. In as much as he does not affect you, you walk away and say ‘what’s my business?Tomorrow they may say I should come to give statements.’ 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. Is it only Highways, how about other roads? If it is a roadblock, it is not acceptable. Wherever they are, once you stand on the road or you hinder free flow of traffic. it is not acceptable. People call me. They send me text messages that your boys are there. So I forward it to the Commissioner of Police. That is why I’m going to appeal to you people, that wherever you are operating, you should have the Commissioner of Police number. The only way you can help is to send a text to the commissioner whenever you witness such a thing. Tell him some guys have constituted themselves as public nuisance on the highway and you forward it to me too if possible. If I give him some reasonable time and he does not take action, I will hold him responsible as breaching of trust. Can you tell us how you intend to equip the police considering the dwindling economy? The economic downturn is something that I cannot really speak about. I can always articulate the needs of the police force. I don’t have the resources directly. We have other departments that oversee the NPF directly. The one that infringes on the operational capacity of the NPF is the Ministry of Police Affairs because they keep our money. You spoke about fighting corruption within the police, how would go about that? It is very easy. When you talk about equipment, they are those things that touch the lives of a policeman. A policeman is corrupt because he is not very sure of the future. If he thinks that his future is not guaranteed, the tendency for him to be corrupt is very high. Don’t forget too that corruption can be something that is pathological. Once you are corrupt, if I put you where they distribute stationery, you will still steal it. So there are issues like that. So the areas I’m trying to talk about is those areas where we can touch the lives of our policemen, inspectors and the likes. We have the cooperative societies, we have set up a mortgage institution, we have a micro finance bank. In our works department, we have been able to attract the best brains we can get from the system. These are architects, quantity surveyors, civil engineers. Now, we have an investment department. Why can’t we pull our mortgage institutions and the cooperative and do direct labour stuff? We can build some houses like 2-bedroom apartment for our workforce where they won’t have to pay more than N2.5 million or N3 million. If it is direct labour, to build a bungalow in this country, you need about N5 to N6 million. If you give it to a contractor, maybe the land is police land, they take our money as counterpart funding then they resell the land to us for N18 million to N20 million. Where do you expect a policeman who does not earn well to do it? There are areas where we can touch their lives and we now put some caveats to say if you remain straight, you will be entitled to this. It is a carrot and stick thing. I have been command commissioner. I have worked in various departments. Sometimes, I have had to rely on my friends out there. The technical platforms I’m talking about, most of my friends set it up for me which ought not to be anyway. I am not unmindful that these boys need tools to work. But with the available resources, we have, we provide those things. The management too, at the strategic level, we should be able to come up with policies that will give them hope that if you remain straight, you are entitled to these things. Now, we also have a scholarship scheme for children of the rank and file. We encourage them that if you are bright, we can give scholarship to two of your children at police secondary school or any other place you want them to go to. The Turkish International School has also given us some support. So, there are some small things you can use to motivate your workforce. I keep saying it, the money is not enough but it is not the least in the society. So are we seeing an increase in Police salary? Oh! Well, yes! Even my predecessors and a lot of us have been making cases about it. I have been in this police management close to five years now. We have always been articulating this issue that it is not enough. But, sometimes, when you make comparative studies, you take some African countries that are not as large as Lagos; you now say that the salary of those people is even bigger than ours. Well if you want to go further to situate it within the context of our institutions; you will see that our population is higher and the things we are taking care of are bigger. Is there any plan to stop a situation in which policemen have become domestic staff or personal bodyguards of politicians and others? One of my friends told me that what we are doing now is to police the elites; we are not policing the security space. So I have already given directives that, as a stop gap measure, all civil commissioners in all states of the federation should not have more than two policemen. As for the excess, we are pulling them out to form Judges Protection Section because we think that, with this tribunal cases that are going on, the judges require special protection. We have already given directives on this and I have asked the Commissioners of Police to immediately effect that. More so, a lot of them gave argument that during the electioneering campaigns, they were scared that their opponents were going to do this and that. But now that it is all over, we are going to take a census of how many policemen do we have out there? And we start pruning them. We will first start from the government houses. What would be your definition of effective policing and what legacy do you intend to leave behind as an IGP? There are always challenges in every facet of our lives. Let me say this on a philosophical note. I have come a long way. I have dreamt dreams. I have travelled extensively around the world. I have served in the corridors of power. I think I am the only policeman who is living in the police history who has served three Inspectors General of Police for five years as Principal Staff Officer. I have articulated what I think responsible policing should be. I think I have the opportunity, no matter how short, to be able to navigate the NPF on the pathway of responsible policing. A police force that, when you meet with them, they are confident, proud, intellectually deep, professionally effective, people who can beat their chests and say ‘yes, I am doing a good job.’ I want members of the public to also see me as somebody who is doing a good job and someone who can change the police force. I think I have both the professional and intellectual capacity to do that. Sometime ago, I was discussing with some of my close friends, I said my kids have been out for a very long time. Whenever they come on holiday, I take them to Benin. I want them to connect with their environment but when people talk about issues of kidnapping, cult groups and I start wandering do I have to start caging my kids, protecting them from going to their environment? I want to see an environment where people can feel free and feel comfortable. Even if a crime happens, we have officers who can detect it or when you give information to an officer, you feel like it is information that has been dropped into the ocean or that cannot be shared with someone. I want to see a policeman whose word is his bond. I want to see a policeman who is neatly dressed and elicits public confidence. I want to see a policeman who, when he speaks, speaks authoritatively about the security space. Those are the policemen I want. In all the officers I have mentored, sometimes, I want to replicate them, I want to see them and say even if I leave tomorrow, that I am leaving some crops of officers who will be able to act as change agents to change the perception of policing in the country. I joined the police force as a civilian. I know I’m going back there again. I should be able to look back after my tenure and say that I have left some indelible mark. Something stands out in your resume. It is the fact that you hold two Bachelors and two Masters, how did you achieve that? Well, I read political Science as my first degree in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. When I left ABU, my mother, who was a teacher, wanted me to be a diplomat. When I did not become a diplomat, she was distressed. She could not understand why her only son ended up in the police. How would she tell her colleagues? I was a graduate already and I told her, ‘no. you don’t understand.’ But she insisted I must go for a Masters, I now promised her that I was going to do a Master’s programme and that when I do the Masters programme, if along the line, she is still not comfortable, I will end up being a journalist or teacher so she was comfortable with that. Immediately, I started thinking. I started doing the Masters programme in political science. But, along the line, I said no, I need a fall back. So, I deviated to law. I now did a first degree in law and did a second degree in law, did Masters in Strategic Studies— in political science. Actually, I have completed a PhD as my exit gift but I still want to connect to my society in public law. That is why I was able to work with IGPs. Though, I socialize but there is a social content to policing.