The directive by an Assistant Inspector-General of Police in charge of Zone 2 Command, Lagos, Abdulmajid Ali, that policemen in the area should undergo mental health test is laudable. The zone comprises Lagos and Ogun states. Why the implementation of such an order has become absolutely necessary is glaring: police recklessly use their powers, to the extent that the public now doubt the sanity of not a few of them.
Such psychiatric screening should not be limited to policemen in this zone; it should go round, as protests against their unprofessionalism are widespread across the country. The delinquency simply cannot continue. A statement from the zone’s spokesman, Muyiwa Adejobi, recently said the AIG’s decision was informed by the need to “avoid any accidental discharge or extra-judicial killing.”
But these ugly incidents have been cascading in Lagos and elsewhere. A few days after Ali’s decision, an overzealous police sergeant, identified as Isaac, killed a driver, Saula Fatai, on August 28, at Orile Iganmu in Lagos, when he fired indiscriminately at a crowd at a bus stop, while clearing the way for his principal.
Reports of policemen found dead drunk and armed with rifles on duty are common. Twin brothers – Taiwo and Kehinde Oyesolu – met their untimely death in December last year under similar circumstances at a hotel in Ketu, Lagos, in the hands of Corporal Stephen James. The intoxicated cop later shot himself. The offence of his victims was that they cautioned him to stop shuffling from one end of the hotel bar to the other, begging for free booze.
Policemen on patrol also killed a 17-year-old boy, Innocent Kokorafa, on August 18 in Bayelsa State, who was returning from his mother’s errand. Realising their folly, they planted a shot gun on him, claiming that he was a hoodlum. The four policemen involved have been detained. These characters are not only a disgrace to the Force, but to the entire country.
If such elements are not involved in extrajudicial killings or drunkenness, they smoke Indian hemp at joints with criminals, kill their colleagues during brawls, or get embroiled in armed robbery. That was the case with Chris Oboko, a corporal attached to the anti-robbery C41 unit of the Nigeria Police in Rivers State. Shortly after he was nabbed in June, he confessed, “Aside from supplying members of my gang with police rifles and bullets, I also help keep their guns in my house without the knowledge of my wife and children.”
We are afraid that Ali is merely grandstanding; one of such populist campaigns that come and go without being put into effect. In January this year, the immediate past Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, had mooted a similar idea – psychiatric tests on recruits and serving officers following rampant abuses in the use of weapons. It ended as just sound bites with his retirement from the service in June.
The authorities cannot hide anymore the fact that there are so many hoodlums in the force, who police in the day and become criminals at night. This bears no good testament to police administration in the country. The problem begins with the recruitment process. In Europe and America, the mental state of recruits and serving officers is periodically evaluated to ensure that policing is entrusted to the right calibre of personnel.
In the United States, the then President Lyndon Johnson’s 1967 Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommendation of psychological evaluation of policemen for recruitment marked a defining moment. However, its adoption was not widespread until the public outrage that greeted the 1991 Rodney King assault, ostensibly to reduce the cost of police brutality litigation.
According to Candice Bernd in Truthout Report, “It is a determination that plays a substantial role in keeping trigger-happy cops off the streets – and thus, more people alive.” In Maryland, USA, policemen with psychological problems are detached from official duty. They return to work only after Psychology Consultants Association had carried out a mental evaluation and given them a clean bill of health.
By contrast, Mike Okiro, as the IG, once noted that the mental stability of 24 police officers, among them two deputy commissioners of police, was suspect. Sadly, that development was not enough to make psychiatric tests part of police recruitment. We have had a case of 10,000 policemen with criminal records joining the Force between 2001 and 2004, as well as 234 recruits finding their way into the Police College, Kaduna, in 2012, some of whom were lepers and had poor eyesight.
A corrupt recruitment template that ensured all this should now give way to a transparent and credible process, especially in the ongoing recruitment of the 10,000 cadets directed by President Muhammadu Buhari. And it should include a mechanism that certifies their mental health; this will inaugurate the much needed new beginning for policing in the country.
But the bad eggs already in the system should be flushed out. A random drug and alcohol-screening programme and regular character checks on all personnel have become imperative. Policing requires individuals who can make sound judgement during moments of crisis. Quite often, our police fail this critical test, leading to the use of live bullets against hapless crowd, where rubber bullets or water canisters could have served the purpose of crowd control without bloodshed.
These absurdities should no longer endure.
