Lawyers and concerned Nigerians have called on the government and the Nigeria Police force to provide world-class training for operatives of the Special Anti Robbery Squad, SARS, instead of disbanding the Unit as being agitated in some quarters. The lawyers spoke following recent killings of innocent Nigerians by policemen who are not SARS operatives which were one of the reasons for the call to disband SARS. Barr. Adoya Amali who is also a security expert and Chief Executive Officer of Concentric Security said “The entire Nigeria police force needs reformation, not just SARS. Look at the killing of the football fan in Lagos that was not done by SARS. The killing of the Civil Defence officer, Jombo in Abuja was not done by SARS.
There have been sanity in SARS since the agitation for reform. I am for the reformation of SARS and they need continuous training and retraining for them to stay within their core mandate which is fighting robbery.” Barrister Agnegbodo Bartholomew, a Lagos based lawyer said: “I am for SARS reformation in the sense that most of the killings ascribed to SARS of recent were not done by their operatives.
Nigerians mistake all policemen in other formations for SARS. One thing that is glaring is that there are provisions within the Police Act and our Criminal Code to take care of any policeman that misbehaved and those who take the life of innocent Nigerians. You would notice that since the agitation to scrap SARS began, there has been an unprecedented rise in crime. Nigerians get attacked by robbers during traffic hours.
Lawyers Speaking further, Barr. Bartholomew said: “My opinion is, will you throw away the baby with the birth water? If there are a few bad eggs within SARS giving them a bad name, the police should use the internal mechanism to fish them out and carry out a re-orientation for serving officers. The re-orientation to uphold the civil norms in policing should be encouraged. There should be constant retraining on the use of firearms to avoid the incident of extrajudicial killing in the cause of operations. As regards their functions, we can not shut our eyes to the overbearing functions of men of the SARS.”
He also stated that: ” The fear of SARS in every environment where there are bad eggs speaks volumes to the security of lives in that environment, while the normal criminal does not bother themselves with the regular policemen, once they hear that SARS is coming. That apprehension creates a sense of security within. Their absence that we have seen in the last few months when they were made to return to their bases has worsened the insecurity of lives. It is not far-fetched that those who, one way or the other, are beneficiaries of the rising crime, or have a skeleton in their cupboard, are those calling for scraping of SARS.” A businessman, Mr. Rapheal said: “We cannot over-emphasize the importance of SARS in reducing crime. The government should reform the outfit and not scrap it” In his contribution, a senior police officer who requested anonymity told Vanguard that: “The recent police killings in Lagos reveal that none of these killings was done by SARS operatives but, some members of the society attribute all police bad behavior to SARS. SARS operatives are well behaved now and they are doing well. You will be amazed at the caliber of guns recovered from miscreants, thugs and robbers in our society by SARS operatives. Today, SARS is one of the police outfits with zeal to withstand the heat of violence or criminal activities like robbery, kidnapping and any other hard crime you can think about. One can take Lagos as a case study, due to the firm stand of SARS. Lagos became a no- go- area for robbers. , it is good to encourage who is doing good instead of condemning them,” he stated.
No comments:
Post a Comment