The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, has denounced the brutal attacks carried out by militants from all over Nigeria that are directed at police officers.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, HURIWA’s National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, urged the Inspector General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, to develop plans for revitalising the ineffective police-community relations committee in order to close the gap between the police and those they are supposed to be protecting.
The rights group claimed that the level of hostility held by the general public in Nigeria for the typical police officer is mind-boggling and demanded that quick-win measures be used to quickly put a stop to these emotions of hatred.
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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 is 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.
Onwubiko said;
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.
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.
