Police lives matter – HURIWA laments attacks, killings of officers

The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, has condemned the indiscriminate violent attacks targeted at police operatives by insurgents from all parts of Nigeria.

HURIWA, in a statement by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, asked the Inspector General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, to roll out strategies for practical revitalization of the moribund police community relations committee to abridge the gulf between police and the policed.

The rights group said the quantum of hatred for the average police operative in Nigeria by the civil populace is mind-boggling demanding that quick win steps are adopted to bring this sentiments of hate to a quick end.

HURIWA, which said no reason is strong enough to justify the massive targeting of armed policemen in their line of duty, however, stressed that the police hierarchy at both the national and sub national levels are grossly lacking in the enforcement of strong deterrent administrative sanctions against indicted police officers who still carry out extra judicial killings of suspects in the police custody across the Country.

The rights group said it is in the self enlightened interests of the police as an institution that extrajudicial killings are stamped out immediately and indicted rogue police operatives prosecuted for mass murders and sanctioned judicially in very transparent court sessions.

“The belief that citizens can just be executed like chickens inside police cells and there is no accountability opens the policing institution up for bottled up angst which have now exploded into full blown ‘civil war against police operatives’ which must be brought to a quick end immediately,” Onwubiko said.

The statement reads, “We have watched with sadness, as the coordinated killings of men and women in police uniform has spiked all across the Country as if some gunmen have declared a war against the police. The truth is that police lives matter just as much as Nigerian lives matter.

“What should be done is to roll out concrete programmes of dialogues and active partnership between the civil society and the Police because there is widespread distrust of the police of Nigeria by a large percentage of Nigerians.

“These police operatives being slaughtered are our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. There is the urgency of the now for effective non-kinetic mechanisms by the Police IGP and his commissioners all over Nigeria.

“Nigeria Police should quickly adopt technology for combating crimes especially in the many vast expensive landed areas in Nigeria that are virtually unpoliced and ungoverned.

“The Police must never carry out a revenge mission to communities whereby their officers are attacked because in most cases those who attack the Police are often not from those communities since violence entrepreneurs known as unknown gunmen are rapidly mobile and are not known to operate from particular locations”.

HURIWA challenged the police to reinvigorate its intelligence generating mechanisms so terrorists, insurgents, are picked up before they inflict mortal damage on Nigeria.