Experts at the Nigeria Society for Criminology (NSC) on Thursday called for national legislation to limit the abuse of state police and check the system of local oppression of Nigerians.
The experts, Professors Etannibi Alemika, Smart Otu, and Lanre Ikuteyijo, made this known during a webinar titled “Perspectives on State Policing” organised by the Nigeria Society for Criminology executive.
The trio highlighted the benefits to include, improvement in security, provision of job opportunities, promotes true federalism, adding that, “A decentralised police system may breed antagonistic competitions among forces, varied standards and processes of operations, partisanship and capture by local dominant powers; poor coordination of information sharing and cross-border operations across jurisdiction; displacement of crime across jurisdiction) associated with the establishment of state police.”
They stressed needing expert input to draft a suitable framework based on research evidence.
While both the society’s board of trustee chairman, Professor Alemika, and Professor Ikuteyijo maintained that the problems facing the Nigerian Police must be solved to make it more efficient and effective, they warned that any rush to establish state police without due diligence will reproduce the same structural, organisational, and individual challenges that the Nigerian police is faced with.
Professor Alemika noted, “Police is not a transformative agency because its role is to reproduce the prevailing social order and repress dissent against it”.
He noted that solutions to crimes and criminality “are to be sought within the social, political and economic structures that cause and reproduce them to benefit Nigeria’s economic, political and social power-holders.
“Police and policing reforms will not guarantee security and development without good governance, efficient public service delivery of essential services such as education, health care, shelter, water, sanitation, communication and transportation by the government as well as opportunity for meaningful employment and income, social recognition, equality and justice, social protection from deprivations.’’
In his opening remarks, Professor Oludayo Tade, president of the Nigeria Society of Criminology, stated that one of the society’s mandates was to guide the government in formulating appropriate policies to check criminality and criminal behaviour and improve Nigeria’s criminal justice system.