Centralised Policing Antithetical To Community Policing, Says Ekweremadu
Loading ...The Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, says community policing cannot work in a centralised policing arrangement as currently obtained in Nigeria.
Ekweremadu, who presided over the Senate plenary on Tuesday, said the implication of community policing was that citizens would have police officers that live within that community, know everybody, and patrol their beat on a daily basis.
He stated this while summing up debate on the motion sponsored by Senator Ademola Adeleke (Osun West) on the need to post junior cadre of the Nigeria Police Force to their states and Local Governments (LGs) of origin to enhance community policing in the country.
Ekweremadu said: “Community policing is good, but the problem is that other places where you have community policing have a different police architecture because community policing is the business of the sub-national police in most federal states. If you go to places like the United States, it is the sub-national police that introduce the community policing. But if you introduce community policing here, where we have a federal system with a unitary police system, then it is going to be difficult to work.
“It is only when you have a decentralised police system, in which case, each sub-national level of government has its own level of policing that it can identify each community, recruit policemen from there, and allow them to do community policing.
“If you do not do that and you want the federal police we have in Nigeria to do it, we will continue to talk about community policing without implementation; and if you implement it, it is not going to work.
“But, I agree that we should hear from the Inspector General of Police, maybe, at the level of the committee, to tell us exactly what they are doing about community policing. However, we must first get the structure right before we can have this in place”.
In a related development, Senator Ekweremadu has also called on the Federal Government to do sometime urgent and drastic about the massive killings across the country.
This followed the alarm raised by Senator Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central) that the FG might have lost grip in the protection of lives and property in the country.
Senator Sani informed the Senate that armed bandits had taken over Birnin Gwari LGA, Kaduna state, laying siege to it for the past two years.
The Senator, who came under Order 43 of the Senate Standing Rule, urged the presidency to tell Nigerians the truth, set politics aside, and save the citizens from merciless bandits because the country was presently living in self-denial
“Government is losing the grip. I am worried that it has lost the essence of being in government if it cannot protect the lives and property of the people”, he cried out.
