Why FG’s community policing can’t work – Ex-AIG

A retired Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG), Ambrose Aisabor, has faulted the proposed community policing programme of the Federal Government.

AIG Aisabor (Rtd) said community policing was not an alternative to state police and could not be decreed from Abuja.

Daily Trust on Sunday reports that the Federal Government had last week approved N13bn for the takeoff of community policing.

But Aisabor, in a chat with our correspondent yesterday, said the concept of community policing implied partnership between the police and the community.

Such a community policing initiative, he observed, could only be efficacious under a state police department.

He said, “It cannot be decreed from Abuja; it doesn’t work like that,” adding that community policing was also a trust between the police and the community, and observed that presently the trust between the police and the community which would have made the policing initiative to work was lacking.

According to him, the police force needed to reinvent itself to earn the trust of the people.

The retired senior cop said, “The Nigeria Police Force (NPF) as presently constituted is known for incivility, highhandedness, intimidation, brutality, lack of godliness in their conduct; turning an accused to a complainant and vice versa.”

He said the police authorities should stop giving out officers as orderlies and guards to people with “dubious sources” of livelihood as part of reinventing the force and mending its “battered” image.

He added that, “The police officers must be trained and retrained; they must be given a new orientation and told money is not everything. Police must be properly funded and well motivated.”

Aisabor advised that instead of superintending community policing from Abuja, relevant sections of the 1999 Constitution should be amended to establish state police departments under which community policing would be subsumed.