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Professional misconduct and demanding money for bail topped complaints received by the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) Complaints Response Unit (CRU) in first half of this year.
The report published by the Head, CPU, ACP Markus Ishaku Basiran, Sunday in Abuja, showed that out of the 1237 complaints the unit received 959 were on professional misconduct by the police officer and 157 on police officers demanding money for bail.
The Police unit report also indicated that a total cases of use of excessive force by police officers was received with 11 of the compliants coming from Lagos State Command, even as FCT followed with seven cases and Akwa Ibom with five cases reported.
Similarly, only Lagos state had one compliant about a police officer appearing dirty in person making it the least reported infringement reported.
This followed by benefits/entitlement which had four complaints with Nasarawa having 2,FCT, Lagos and Kwara having one complaints each.
The Lagos State Police Command also had the highest number of cases with 330 complaints, followed by FCT Abuja with 168, and Rivers 93; while Gombe and Kebbi State Commands had no single recorded complaint within this period.
Also, 989 of the 1,237 complaints, signifying 79 per cent of the reported cases, were resolved; 62 complaints, 5 percent, were found to be false; and 186 complaints are still under investigation.
The report showed 432 reports, 34.92 per cent, were received through phone calls; 298, 24.09 per cent, through WhatsApp; three through SMS, 0.24 per cent;
26, 2.16 per cent, through emails; 346 that is 27.97 per cent, was received via Twitter; nine, 0.73 per cent, on Facebook; while 123, 0.73 per cent; were received through other sources including petitions and media publications.
The head of the unit noted that the full Lockdown enforcement was within same period,M arch to June, when the federal government began to relax the lockdown, even he said the detail of sanctioned policemen in the period would be reflected in subsequent report.
According to him, “The Unit re-iterates its earlier recommendation that, a selected number of officers from the Unit, FPRD, X-Squad, ServiCom and PCB be sent to the three states in the interim to enable interaction with policemen and members of the general public with a view to assessing existing methods that will eventually birth new approaches in the reduction of complaints in those states.
“This, aside other measures to be recommended are being carefully studied in the light of their workability or demand for re-tweaking. The three states mentioned earlier, have consistently recorded the most complaint since the establishment of the CRU in 2015.”
CRU can be contacted via: 0805 700 0001, calls only; 0805 700 0002 SMS only; and 0805 700 0003 WhatsApp only.
Others are: Twitter: @PoliceNG_CRU | Facebook: www.facebook.com/PoliceCRU; email: [email protected] or [email protected] and Website: www.npf.gov.ng/complaint.
