A United States based group, Human Rights Watch(HRW), has called for enquiry into statistics revealing the killing of more than 8,000 Nigerians by police since 2000.
This is in reaction to an announcement by the police, that more than 785 suspected armed robbers have been killed recently.
According to a statement issued in Washington, HRW wants government to launch an independent public inquiry into the claim.
�The figures show 785 killed in just three months this year, while the true number of people killed by the police since 2000 may exceed 10,000.
�On November 14, 2007, Inspector General of Police, Mike Okiro, announced that 785 suspected “armed robbers” were shot and killed in gunfire exchanges with the police between June and the beginning of September 2007.
According to the same set of statistics, 1,628 armed robbers were arrested during the same period. Police also killed one person for every two fire arms they managed to recover,� Peter Takirambudde, Africa Director at Human Rights Watch was quoted as saying.
“It’s stunning that the police killed half as many ‘armed robbery suspects’ as they managed to arrest during Okiro’s first 90 days, and its scandalous that leading police officials seem to regard the routine killing of Nigerian citizens, criminal suspects or not, as a point of pride.
“The figures suggest that police have routinely resorted to disproportionate and illegal use of lethalforce and may have committed multiple extra-judicial killings in the course of police operations,� Takirambudde said.
Suchindications are especially worrying in light ofnumerous well-documented cases of deaths of detaineesin police custody. Almost as disturbing as the numbersthemselves is that leading police officials appear toregard these grim statistics as an indication ofeffective police work rather than as a scandal. Okiroannounced the statistics to the House ofRepresentatives’ Police Affairs Committee in a speechchronicling the “achievements” of his first threemonths in office.Nigeria’s police force remains mired in deeplyentrenched patterns of torture, corruption, murder,and other forms of human rights abuse. Torture remainsa routine part of police interrogation and policeofficers have carried out numerous extrajudicialkillings of suspects in their custody. A 2005 reportby Human Rights Watch documented systemic patterns oftorture and extrajudicial killings in the policeforce, and in March 2007 the UN Special Rapporteur onTorture found that torture remained “an intrinsic partof how law enforcement services operate” in Nigeria.Many parts of Nigeria experience extremely high levelsof violent crime, owing partly to rising poverty, highunemployment and the proliferation of small armsthroughout the country. Dozens of Nigerian policeofficers die in the line of duty every year.Nigeria’s police generally lack capacity to deal withthe challenges they face. Police officers are poorlytrained, ill-equipped, and poorly remunerated. Somehuman rights abuses carried out by the police arepartly a response to public pressure to reduce thehigh levels of violent crime. Nigerian civil societygroups and Human Rights Watch’s own investigationshave revealed that, lacking the means to carry outeffective criminal investigations, some policeofficers extract confessions through torture, ormurder suspects in their custody who police believe tobe guilty. Other cases represent a simple abuse ofpower targeting ordinary civilians.Police officers routinely label individuals they killas “armed robbers” who fired on police; according topolice statistics, all of the thousands of individualsshot and killed by police officers were “armedrobbers.” Credible government investigations intoallegations of disproportionate use of force or murderhave been extremely rare and the facts on the groundoften belie the claims of police officials. In June2005, the murder of six young people at a policecheckpoint in Abuja generated a nationwide scandalthat led to an investigation and criminal chargesagainst the officers involved, but that case was anexception to prevailing norms. Reported cases ofinvestigations into police killings have beenextremely rare and accountability even less common.In August 2006, police arrested and publicly “paraded”12 armed robbery suspects in the Abia State town ofUmuahia; the 12 were later found among a pile of 16corpses deposited near a local mortuary. Policeofficials claimed that all 16 were armed robbers whohad somehow been involved in an exchange of gunfirewith the police. No investigation was carried out.According to the police’s own statistics, policepersonnel have shot and killed more than 8,000 peoplesince January 2000 in circumstances that remainlargely unexplained. In 2005, police officials toldHuman Rights Watch that from January 2000 to March2004 police personnel killed 7,198 “armed robbers” in”combat.” Remarkably, during the first three months of2004, the police claimed to have killed 422 armedrobbers in shootouts, while recovering only 300firearms.The figures available to Human Rights Watch do notinclude any data for police killings during most of2004, 2005, 2006, or the first half of 2007. If policekillings were carried out at even half the averagerate during that period, Nigeria’s police have killedin excess of 10,000 people.Nigeria is a party to the International Covenant onCivil and Political Rights, and as such has anobligation to carry out an effective officialinvestigation when individuals have been killed as aresult of the use of force by any law enforcementofficial. International standards also require that,when resort to firearms and use of force isunavoidable, the police exercise restraint and act inproportion to the seriousness of the offense, so as torespect and preserve human life. Governments arerequired to ensure that arbitrary or abusive use offorce and firearms by police is appropriatelypunished.Human Rights Watch called upon the federal governmentto end the rampant impunity that makes police abusespossible and commonplace. In addition to an immediatepublic investigation of police activity since Okirocame to office, resources must be devoted to improvedpolice training, including training on human rightsissues as well as legal and appropriate interrogationtechniques.