• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

When police become robbers

One sure sign of a disjointed society is when law enforcement officers, employed by the state to keep the society safe begin to prey on society, replacing or jostling with criminals and robbers to do maximum damage to innocent citizens. Much more tragic is the silence or inability of the government to stop the barefaced harassment, extortion, theft and robbery of its citizens by rouge police officers. The rouge police officers may themselves be victims of the government’s inability or refusal to pay them living wages and provide decent habitation for them.

Last week, the media across the world carried the story of Nigeria’s tech industry rising up against police harassment and extortion after a tech developer at Buffer Media in Lagos – Akinmolayan Oluwatoni – tweeted that members of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian police stopped him on his way home (with a laptop and iPhone), took him to the station, tortured him to confess he’s an internet fraudster and demanded N1 million to release him. Tired of the constant harassment and extortion by police officers of the SARS, leaders of the tech industry in Lagos organised a campaign with the hashtag #StopRobbingUs to protest the police actions.

We recall that in November of 2017, Nigerians started an aggressive campaign with the hashtag #endSARS to protest against police – and especially SARS personnel’s – brutality, sexual harassment, extortion, theft and outright robbery. An online petition, with tens of thousands of signatories, was submitted to the National Assembly seeking the scrapping of the unit.

It is mind boggling that in this age youth with phones, cameras and laptops and other such gadgets have become endangered species at the hands of SARS operatives who operate brazenly at any time of day with no recourse to any civilised terms of engagement. Reports have since continued to pour in on SARS operatives’ activities with evidence-backed accusations of torture, robberies at gunpoint and extra-judicial killings.

Amnesty International, in a 2016 report on the activities of SARS said it received reports from lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists, and collected testimonies stating that some police officers in SARS regularly demand bribes, steal and extort money from criminal suspects and their families. The global human rights watchdog also stated that SARS detainees are held in a variety of locations, including a grim detention centre in Abuja known as the “Abattoir”, where detainees are kept in overcrowded cells and in inhuman conditions.

According to Damian Ugwu, Amnesty International’s Nigeria researcher, “SARS officers are getting rich through their brutality. In Nigeria, it seems that torture is a lucrative business.” The report also detailed testimonies from former SARS detainees who said they were subjected to horrific torture methods, including hanging, starvation, beatings, shootings and mock executions at the hands of corrupt officers from the dreaded SARS.

In 2017, following the #endSARS campaign, the police authorities briefly banned SARS operatives from conducting stop and search operations on roads except when necessary. They also promised to restructure and reposition the unit for effective service delivery while also warning members of the group against acting as body-guards, delving into land matters and debt collection that were considered civil. However, the measures did not last as SARS operatives have continued to harass, extort and rob innocent citizens in such alarming scale.

The reality is that there is no real commitment to reform the police. When reports of police corruption or brutality emerge, the authorities seem to take action, but only for a while. In no time, the police go back to business as usual. For instance, since 1999, there has not been a police boss that has not hypocritically ordered the dismantling of the notorious police road-blocks in Nigeria. But till date, those road blocks still exists in all nooks and crannies of the country and serve as the medium for the extortion of, and killing of Nigerians and road users who refused to settle the policemen