The police is nobody’s friend

Abimbola Adelakun

One of the cheering news that came from the Nigeria Police Force
last week was the redeployment of its head of the Complaint
Response Unit, Assistant Commissioner of Police Abayomi Shogunle,
to a rural region of the country. With any luck, Shogunle finding
himself without a Twitter soapbox will restrain him from doing
further harm to the reputation of the NPF and Nigeria via his
trenchant narrow-mindedness on the Internet. I am going to let down
my guards this time and even commend the upper echelons of the NPF
for taking this small step at this time. Hopefully, they commit
themselves to more acts of responsiveness in the future in their
public affairs and realise they owe it to the public to respond on
issues that require accountability and responsibility.

Shogunle personifies the many things wrong in the digital age
when an individual is installed as the face of an organisation’s
digital channels and they begin to purge their unfiltered thoughts
into the social sphere. Even if his attitude of blocking Nigerian
citizens who interact with him online was set aside along with his
illogical verbosity, clapback on the #EndSARS advocacy, and the
advice of speaking Pidgin English to the police as an antidote to
‘accidental discharges,’ his dismissive comments on the alleged
commercial sex workers arrested by the police in Abuja night clubs
shows he is just another provincial mind in a federal office.

As far he was concerned, the public outrage over the arrest was
just some folk “making (a) noise on (sic) the clampdown on
prostitutes.” Come on, even if the ladies were truly sex workers,
are they not human enough to deserve collective empathy for the
sexual abuses and physical assault they allegedly suffered in the
hands of Shogunle’s colleagues? For someone who claims to be the
head of “Complaint Response Unit,” he has no sense of what his job
truly entails. We might as well be wasting our time sending any
official complaint to his office. Heavens help the people of
Nkalagu, Ebonyi State where he has now been gladly farmed out
to!

Shogunle has proved himself ill-informed in a police uniform,
but we should not imagine for a moment that he exists in isolation
in the NPF. He is by no means an aberration that, if stamped out of
the NPF, restores the organisation’s dignity and integrity. No, the
NPF is full of similar folk like him, and the major difference was
that Shogunle was the one manic enough to use the social media to
broadcast his unlearned state. By this, I mean the NPF harbours
police officer(s) who lack any inclination to acquaint themselves
with the fundamentals of law and order in the society and their
role as police officers in guaranteeing it. They simply put on
their uniforms, grab a baton, and they are all over the place
acting with the force of authority they symbolise. The irony is
that those who mostly lack a deeper appreciation of what they
represent and how they should take their jobs, are the most
zealous. With the vacuity of not knowing, and not knowing that they
do not know what they do not know comes an inevitable sense of
incompetence they make up for with excessive brutality against
hapless citizens.

Many of us are living witnesses to the horrible tales of the
NPF’s cruelty. Starting with all the personal narratives that
emerged from the #EndSARS campaign against the Special Anti-Robbery
Squad, one wonders if the first crime that Nigeria needs to
apprehend is not the one the police agencies are legally sanctioned
to commit against the people. There were gory stories of brutality,
extrajudicial killings, assault, intimidation, illegal arrests,
extortions, harassment and even outright torture. We have hired
monsters. As horrible as all these stories of police brutality
were, they were not unfamiliar. Many of us were alive when the Apo
6 incident happened at the Federal Capital Territory. We saw how
long the case dragged and the wildly unsatisfying manner it was
concluded without justice settled for the victims. More than a
decade after that incident, we are still here and dealing with
similar issues.

The NPF officers have barely graduated or become better
sophisticated in their predatory behavior or comportment. They are
an anti-criminal organisation that targets people for the crime of
being young and displaying acts of youthful exuberances such as
sagging their jeans or even acting uppity by carrying everyday
gadgets such as laptops or iPhones. These officers barely operate
from the level of high intelligence their job requires. Because
they are not socialised to understand the ideological underpinning
of their job, they do not see their public conduct as one of the
many pieces of banal actions that come together to fit into a
systemic whole of brutality and repression. Everything about them
seems to be more about brute, force, and a display of brawn. If
Nigeria were a litigious society where they get sued regularly for
their actions, they would have been long bankrupt owing from the
amount of compensation they would have had to regularly pay for
their lack of discretion.

The bases on which we indict the police for their harshness are
not just derived from the stories from their victims alone. The
police officers themselves offer the best examples of their poor
understanding of their job through their self-accounting. Shogunle
is one example. Earlier this year, a Chief Superintendent and Zone
2 Police Public Relations Officer, CSP Dolapo Badmos, wrote on her
personal social media page that those who are “homosexual in
nature” should leave the country or face prosecution. No matter
what your stand on homosexuality might be, we should not overlook
the ignorant mindset that prompts an NPF officer to ask anyone to
leave the country. When was the last time the NPF ordered corrupt
public officers whose sins truly impact the society to leave the
country or face prosecution? Is it not a problem when a police
officer cannot separate her prejudices from the legal substance of
issues?

The other day too, the Lagos State Police Command spokesperson,
Bala Elkana, stated that the police harass people who wear tattoos
and dreadlocks because those displays of self-aesthetisation are
foreign to our culture. Elkana claimed that because most people
that they have arrested for being in cults have those
self-accouterments, they more or less profile everyone who either
wears tattoo or dreadlocks. How did our society end up with
policemen who have set themselves up as arbitrators of culture and
who ascribe to themselves the right to define what is our “culture”
or not? The issue at stake is not so much about an organisation
like the police ascribing to itself the power to legislate the
parameters of what constitutes culture as much as it is a testimony
to sincere ignorance that unfortunately uses the power of deadly
force to launch its own ill-digested ideas of what social virtues
might be.

There have already been several solutions prescribed to the
menace they constitute to the society. Yes, people have rightfully
asked for a dissolution of SARS, the creation of state police, and
other kinds of reforms that will moderate the excesses of the
current centralised police. The nature of reforms the NPF requires
is one that will more or less involve an entire re-birth of the
organisation. It needs a complete overhaul of its systems and
structures and an indulgence in the process of ideological
re-orientation. Part of the problem, of course, includes the
low-level educational requirement people present to enter the
force. We are dealing with people who are ignorant in a literal and
metaphoric sense even if they can use tools like Twitter. These
officers need education, training, and a form of socialisation that
teaches them from the outset that their job is to co-build the
society and ensure its flourishing, not its extinction.

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