Reform the Police

A very good friend of mine just survived a terrible incident while traveling from Lagos to Aba.

He was traveling in a bus that was driving a few vehicles behind another bus. Through the windshield he saw what appeared to be a uniformed "policeman" flag down the bus ahead of them. As soon as the bus stopped, a group of armed robbers sprang out of the bushes to attack that first bus.

This happened in broad daylight, at 3:00pm in the afternoon.

While this is awful, it isn't the reason for my post per se. Unfortunately, violent crime is a feature of this planet. It happens everywhere. There is no place on Earth in which you are free from the risk.

No, it is what happened next. My friend's bus was able to make a U-turn and escape the fate of the first bus. Some way down the road, the ran into that inevitable feature of our inter-city expressways, the police checkpoint; such extortion choke points are one of several reasons there is little "express" about our "expressways".

At the checkpoint they notified the police that there was a robbery in action just a short way up the road. The police reply? They said they were "not on robbery patrol", and that was the end of it.

This is the reason for my post.

In all the years I lived in Nigeria, I was never the victim of a direct crime; all of us are victims of various unpunished crimes, but that is another story. I am glad I wasn't, because if criminals had attacked, I would have been entirely defenseless. In those days, only the wealthy and well-connected had telephones; and even if we had had a telephone, the unpleasant truth is the police would not have responded to a distress call. They would have said their vehicle was in disrepair, or that there was no fuel in the vehicle; if we were lucky, they would show up the next day in the afternoon or evening and ask us to defray the cost of the fuel they used to come to our home (never mind the fact that their investigative skills were so poor, and their arrival on the crime scene so late, and their professional disinterest so great, that they were unlikely to ever "solve" the crime in spite of our having coughed out money to pay for their gas.

This is the problem. It is a bigger problem than crime.

There are violent criminals everywhere in the world, but the difference in the citizens' experience of crime lies entirely in the mind of the criminal. Where a criminal thinks he can do what he wants with a high probability of getting away with it, citizens' experience is worse. In contrast, where a criminal thinks there is a strong chance he will be captured, prosecuted and punished, crime doesn't vanish, but citizens' experience of it is different.

This is a reality even within countries with better police forces than ours. In the United States, for example, the police forces give a higher priority to crime prevention in wealthier neighbourhoods and a lower priority to poorer neighbourhoods, and it shows in those neighbourhoods' varying experiences of crime.

Nigerian criminals are not intrinsically worse than criminals elsewhere, and while some idiots like to talk as though all Nigerians are criminals, we as a the peoples of Nigeria are not any worse than any other peoples in the world.

The problem is Nigerian criminals are well aware that their odds of being apprehended and prosecuted range from minimal to negligible. This is why assassins can stroll casually in the busy, crowded streets of cities like Lagos and Onitsha, patiently approach their victim, calmly kill him in front of everybody, take the time to pump extra bullets to make sure he has no chance of survival, stretch their muscles, ponder the philosophies of Emmanuel Kant, read several books, make phone calls to their girlfriends, and then (and only then) stroll to their getaway vehicles to flee the scene. Well, they don't really "flee", they just calmly drive away.

Now you may be offended by my facetious remarks in the preceding paragraph, but trust me, it is grim, gallows humour ... the humour of the powerless man lamenting his fate.

They have no fear at all.

In fact, if by some chance a few of their colleagues are arrested, the criminals too-frequently launch frontal assaults on police stations and prisons to free said colleagues. We don't keep statistics, but I bet Nigeria has been the scene of far more "daring" attacks on prisons and police stations than any country outside an active war zone.

They have no fear at all.

The systems and institutions of law enforcement in our Federal Republic have been in desperate need of reform, restructuring and transformation since before Independence. In fact, the Colonial and Pre-Colonial systems of such were each in their way as problematic as the Post-Colonial variant has turned out.

It isn't just the Nigerian Police Force, but the nature, structure, form and functionality of the judiciary and of the legal profession.

Look around at the candidates in the oft-postponed 2011 Elections at all three tiers. Do any of them sound like they appreciate the depth of the problem? Do any of them sound like they have a thought-through, realistic plan to begin the long process of reform? Do any of them have the credibility to inspire trust in cookie-cutter promises of reform?

How many times have we changed governments since 1960?

What impact have these changes ever had on the Nigerian Police Force?

We have a much more intractable problem. You see, the people with the power to instigate reform are people who are threatened by the prospect of law enforcement institutions that work well. They know what they do, and they know that what they do would make them targets of any effective law enforcement regime .... so there is no reform and there never will be.