By Joe Adeyeye
I have always known that majority of Nigerians hold the police in contempt. However, this knowledge only deepened after I became a crime reporter and I had to make the rounds of crime scenes and police formations.
Sadly, it was a bloody incident in the Agege area of Lagos that helped me to gauge the depth of this communal angst. A gang of armed robbers had run into a police patrol team at a filling station. The robbers opened fire immediately, killing the policemen on the spot. The sight was a grisly mess of splattered brain, bloody entrails and death.
Such sights would wring a sigh or tear out of the stoniest of men. That afternoon in Agege, it did not even get an ounce of pity from the onlookers. Rather, eyewitnesses, who had scampered away when the battle began, reportedly cheered after the robbers got the better of the policemen.
For days, that image soured my mood. It is one thing to cheer when the Inspector General of Police’s Monitoring Team swoop on corrupt policemen at checkpoints; but to cheer when another human being loses his life in such a tragic manner is something I couldn’t just fathom.
Many years after, the motivation of these eyewitnesses is still something that I cannot comprehend. I have filed it away as one of those rare, incomprehensible anomalies that life throws in our faces at the least expected time. Although to the extreme, the incident was also symptomatic of the latent rage we habour against policemen.
Why do we dislike our policemen so much? Is it because many policemen are quick to demand for bribes at gunpoint, brutalise with batons, show no remorse when they slaughter the innocent and bark at us as if we are lower than Constables? I think it is all these and much more. We dislike our police, because by their brutality, extrajudicial killings and corruption, they show that they have nothing but contempt for us. This mutually negative emotion, I think, is best explained with Newtonian Physics: to every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction.
I concede that this answer appears simplistic and it takes a great deal for granted. But believe me, it is backed by a great body of work, within and outside the academia. Some of these works are excellent materials, but most are horribly written and hurriedly stapled sorry excuses for final-year projects. Save for regurgitated theories and worn ideas, they add nothing to the existing body of knowledge.
To understand the origin of the deep grudge that generations of Nigerians have nursed against the police and its effects, one of the best places to look are the exhaustive reports churned out by international human rights organisations.
One of the leaders in this field, Amnesty International, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning NGO, issued one of such reports this week, a 67-page report entitled, Killing at Will: Extrajudicial Killings and Other Unlawful Killings in Nigeria. The report chronicles what no self-respecting Nigerian crime reporter would consider unfamiliar: that the police routinely torture suspects, shoot them at will, dump their bodies in government morgues and use all their powers to help killer policemen escape justice.
The report accuses the police of being responsible for “hundreds of extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings and enforced disappearances every year” It makes this point with vivid pictures and pointed paragraphs. One of its most compelling narratives is about a June 2009 visit to the Special Anti-Robbery Squad detention centre in Abuja.
There, it says, “suspects are held in a vast warehouse previously used for slaughtering cattle” A policeman reportedly confessed to the team that extrajudicial killings took place there and the team counted 30 empty bullet cases scattered below massive chains that could have been used to hang suspects.
I am not surprised that the police authorities have rushed to deny the report. I would have been surprised, if they didn’t. After all, we are in a season of denials. Government officials now prove their loyalty by denying the obvious.
But while top government officials may get away with half truths and outright lies about President Umaru Yar’Adua’s true condition, for example, the police have an uphill task to persuade us that the Amnesty report is a lie.
Two tragic events in the course of the week are sure to make their job difficult. First is the unfortunate incident in Ijebu Ife, Ogun State, where some policemen reportedly killed 16 townspeople and razed scores of houses in retaliation for the unfortunate lynching of a senior police officer. The other is a revealing British Broadcasting Corporation report on police extrajudicial killings in Nigeria and the dumping of the corpses of victims in government hospitals.
The fact is, there is little that Amnesty has documented that other prestigious individuals and organisations didn’t say in the past. In 2005, Mr. Phillip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial Summary and Arbitrary Executions, visited Nigeria and reached similar conclusions about our police. “While armed robbery does plague much of Nigeria, the label of ‘armed robber’ is often used to justify the jailing and/or extrajudicial execution of innocent individuals who have come to the attention of the police for reasons ranging from a refusal to pay a bribe to insulting or inconveniencing the police. Inquiries are often used for whitewashing purposes.” Last year, global human rights watchdog, Human Rights Watch, also graded our police in this area and scored them low marks in a widely publicised report.
Since we are a praying nation, I think we should treat this surfeit of advice that we have been getting from outsiders as answers to our loud supplications for change. Our governments having turned a deaf ear to several home-grown counsel, it could be that heaven, which recently sent Madame Hilary Clinton to advise us on true democracy and the Venezeluan ambassador to offer us free tutorials on oil sector management, also sent the BBC and Amnesty International to nudge us to reform our murderous police Force.
Such a reform process should be driven by the Federal Government, not the police. For starters, I would suggest that government show good faith in two broad areas. One, as it was done in Brazil, another country where police extrajudicial killings are rampant, government should establish an autonomous special agency to investigate and prosecute policemen accused of extrajudicial killings.
Two, I think senior officers, from divisional police officers upwards, should be made to pay a price for the misdeeds of their men. This worked and stemmed extrajudicial killings during the tenure of a former Lagos police commissioner. I think it will work wonders again.