A bold step was taken on the establishment of state police last Thursday in Abuja when the seven-man steering committee set up on the framework of the policy by the Inspector-General of Police, Tunji Disu, submitted its proposal to the Senate Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution, chaired by the Deputy Senate President, Barau Jibrin.
From the snippets of the report released to the public, the proposal is comprehensive and fairly thoughtful. It is a great leap forward in the quest to establish the much sought-after state police.
The report, among others, recommends a two-tier policing architecture, which proposes the creation of a Federal Police Service (FPS) and 37 State Police Services (SPS) across the states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory.
The FPS, which will replace the Nigeria Police Force, subject to constitutional amendment, will focus on national security, terrorism, interstate crime and federal law enforcement, while the SPS, as their primary mandate, are proposed to handle local criminal offences, domestic violence, homicide, armed robbery and community policing.
There are, however, three recommendations in the proposal that we feel are injudicious and will be incongruous with the spirit behind the agitation for state police, in the first place.
First, the framework is proposing the redevelopment of 60 per cent of the current central police personnel to the proposed State Police Services (SPS), while the Federal Police Force (FPS) will retain about 40 per cent of the federal police workforce for national roles.
The current strength of the federal police is 370,000. About 60 per cent of that figure is 222,000, the number being recommended for redeployment to the proposed SPS.
Second, the committee also recommends the establishment of a National Police Standards Board (NPSB), what it calls an independent 13-member federal board that will set the minimum national standards covering recruitment, training, conduct, accountability and funding across all police services. The board, the committee proposes, will also monitor and enforce the standards and publish annual compliance ratings for every state service.
Third, it also precludes the state police personnel from fighting terrorism and banditry, limiting its proposed “mandate” to local-cum-community policing, domestic violence and armed robbery.
These three recommendations are distasteful. They are not well thought out. Hence, implementing them will be counterproductive.
In the first place, it is impolitic to start off the proposed State Police Services with 60 per cent of the current central police personnel, because it amounts to yoking the new services with the ‘image baggage’ of the central police force.
Although the federal police is blessed with a crop of fine, articulate and quite professional officers, many of whom are also highly educated and giving a good account of themselves in their various positions, but the force is also bedeviled by a generation of vile, corrupt and avaricious personnel who are desecrating it.
In conduct and appearance, they are scuzzy scums who commit atrocities, including framing and fleecing the innocent, with their uniforms. These are the personnel that are giving the police force the bad image. This is what has created the disconnect between the force and the people.
Hence, integrating 222,000 of the central police force or FPS, into the proposed SPS will transfer this ‘image baggage’ to the soon-to-be fledgling services. The trust deficit this will create may impede the smooth operation of the SPS, especially in effective intelligence, which is largely trust-driven.
So, let us catch them young and fresh. Let all the various state police services recruit fresh blood, who should then be trained in rigorous combat techniques, intelligence, surveillance and renaissance (ISR) by an assemblage of the mobile police unit of the federal police force, the Department of State Services (DSS) and the appropriate arms of the military.
Secondly, the proposed establishment of a 13-member National Police Standards Board (NPSB) to set, monitor and enforce standards for the SPS is akin to tying the forces to the apron strings of the central police or FPS.
This is unacceptable. If this is allowed, nothing would have changed. And the SPS that will emerge will be a replica of the federal police because the IGP will be surreptitiously teleguiding the forces. In a federal system, the state police should be wholly independent of the central police to achieve maximum efficiency.
One of the strong reasons for the agitation for state police is the current constitutional role of state governors in security matters, which is utterly incongruous with modern realities. Section 214(4) of the 1999 Constitution, for instance, provides that the governor could give the Commissioner of Police in his state lawful directives towards maintaining adequate security but added a ludicrous caveat, to the effect that the President or any minister he so delegates should first be intimated before the directives could be carried out.
In these unpredictable modern times when security breaches occur with the speed of lightning, that provision is considered loathsome because the governor needs a security system at his beck and call. State police aptly fits the bill.
Hence, the proposed SPS must be independent of the federal police for the governor, as his state’s Chief Security Officer, to control the lever, in collaboration with a State Police Service Commission (SPSC), which is one of the recommendations of IGP Committee. The commission should be made up of security experts and credible, honest and dispassionate private citizens who are also stakeholders.
The IGP committee made some welcome recommendations to prohibit partisan deployments, owing to the widespread concern that state police could be weaponised by governors. Apart from the the setting up of independent State Police Service Commissions, insulated from executive interference, it recommends criminal sanctions for officials who issue unlawful orders, and a Federal High Court fast-track review of politically-motivated deployments.
Some of the layered oversight provisions recommended by the committee, “to prevent capture by any single political interest,” include State Police Ombudsmen— an independent complaints body— State House of Assembly standing committees, “mandatory body- worn cameras with secure cloud storage, and public performance dashboards showing use-of-force statistics and community satisfaction data.”
The committee recommends that the state police policy requires amendments to Section 214 of the 1999 Constitution and the Second Schedule to allow SPS co-exist with the FPS and move the former from the Exclusive List to the Concurrent Legislative List.
Thirdly, it is totally out of tune with one of the reasons state police was canvassed for to preclude the services from fighting terrorists and bandits. With the increasing ubiquity of terrorism and banditry, the state governors need a force they could easily deploy in cases of security emergencies, especially attacks by the terrorists and bandits in their domains.
Currently, it is a wicked irony that the governors, even as their states’ chief security officers, have no direct control over any security agency. And in case of emergencies, they have to apply to the commander-in-chief for military deployment, which in some cases may take some time.
In essence, in addition to rigorously training the SPS operatives, they should be armed with sophisticated weapons and modern, technology-driven equipment to be able to effectively tackle terrorists and bandits to a level. Reinforcement can be sought from the military whenever they are overwhelmed.
We urge the Senate Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution to heed the presidential directive to expedite action on the state police matter. The committee should consider admonitions and recommendations that will free the proposed SPS from the stranglehold of the central police and strengthen the forces to be able to complement security forces in the fight against terrorism and banditry.