Second, violence and fraud were employed in the conquest of the nationalities. Consequently, the colonizer feared resistance and police forces under various names were established and employed as an instrument of violence and oppression against the indigenous population.
Third, given the character of colonial rule, police forces were the instrument used to sustain alien domination. The colonial police were not accountable to the colonized but to the colonizers.
It was not formed to protect the people. Little wonder, the police as today find it difficult to protect the people.
In , a member armed paramilitary Hausa Constabulary was formed. In , the Lagos Police was established. During the colonial period, most police were associated with local governments native authorities. In the s, under the First Republic, these forces were first regionalized and then nationalized. The British merged Lagos colony and the southern and northern protectorates in and named the new colony Nigeria.
Another author, O. During the colonial period, police fright was a feature of popular consciousness. Post Colonial After the colonialists left, there was no attempt by the military to redirect and refocus the police. When the country adopted a regional system of government, the local police existed side by side with the federal police.
This stopped in when the local forces were disbanded as recommended by a panel set up in by the military regime of Aguiyi Ironsi. The Committee or Working Party also referred to as Gobir Panel, so named after its chairman was requested to consider the desirability of dual local and National or centralized unified police and prisons service.
The Committee submitted its report to the military regime led by General Yakubu Gowon that succeeded Ironsi regime overthrown in July and recommended the abolition of local police forces and prison services. According to the Federal Government of Nigeria Working Party Report, the local police forces were poorly trained, corrupt and used for partisan political purposes, including the repression of opponents, by traditional rulers and politicians in Northern Nigeria as well as by political parties and governments in power in the Northern and Western Regions.
However, the police enjoyed a good relationship with the military under General Gowon During that period the police were co-opted into governance by the military as state governors and members of the national ruling council. As a result, the NPF was chronically underfunded and marginalized by the military governments during this period.
As the military government of General Olusegun Obasanjo prepared to return Nigeria to civilian rule in , the government embarked on a massive police recruitment campaign while largely discarding recruitment and training standards. Internal government and civil society reports during this time consistently identified problems of misconduct within the NPF.
They include traffic, vehicle inspection and criminal investigation duties. The successive military governments installed few effective checks on abuses of police authority, leaving misconduct and corruption to flourish. At the end of military rule in , there were approximately , police officers in the Nigeria Police Force. This amounted to just one police officer for every Nigerians, well below the United Nations-recommended general benchmark of one police officer per citizens.
In response to rising levels of crime that followed the end of military rule, thenPresident Olusegun Obasanjo ordered the inspector general of police to undertake yet another massive recruitment drive aimed at adding 40, police officers per year for five years.
Similar to the recruitment drive of the late s, police authorities made little effort to screen candidates for criminal backgrounds, and many recruits simply bribed their way into the force. By , the police force, at some ,, had more than doubled in size in less than eight years.
However, the Nigerian government failed to provide a commensurate increase in funding to train, equip, and manage the vastly enlarged force. The Nigeria Police Force is a federal government institution with a centralized command structure headed by the inspector general of police IGP who reports directly to the president.
Law enforcement authorities usually respond to crimes slowly, if at all, and provide little or no investigative support to victims. A major and continuing problem is the commercial scam or sting that targets foreigners, including many US citizens. Such scams may involve U. The scams generally involve phony offers of either outright money transfers or lucrative sales or contracts with promises of large commissions or up-front payments.
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