Toward safer urban settlements

The situation is said to be particularly bad because distress calls hardly elicit much response from the police and other law enforcement agencies.Worried by the development, the UN Habitat and UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), recently teamed up with the Nigerian Police Force to hold a three-day meeting toward seeking a solution. The […]

The situation is said to be particularly bad because distress calls hardly elicit much response from the police and other law enforcement agencies.Worried by the development, the UN Habitat and UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), recently teamed up with the Nigerian Police Force to hold a three-day meeting toward seeking a solution.

The meeting tagged “Policing Urban Spaces’’, was aimed at advancing community/police relations and minimising urban crime.

Mr Alioune Badiane, Regional Director of UN Habitat, who spoke at the meeting held in Abuja, lamented that majority of urban citizens in developing countries were exposed to many threats in their daily life.

He identified some of the threats to include natural disasters, insecure land tenure, food insecurity, terrorism and everyday crime and violence.

“Only few rural dwellers live in peaceful, quiet and well planned neighbourhoods.

“In Africa, for instance, cities such as Lagos, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban and Nairobi account for a sizeable proportion of their nation’s crime.

“Urban areas in Africa also have the highest reported levels of burglary,’’ he said.

According to him, statistics in South Africa showed that the police in 2000 recorded 460 robberies for every 100,000 people.

The report showed that 30 per cent of residents in Johannesburg reported that they had been victims of robbery.

Badiane stressed the need for relevant stakeholders in urban areas to harmonise the various interests, diversities and inherent contradictions within the cities to provide a safe and secured environment to the population.

He challenged the meeting to develop a network and framework to support States and Local Governments toward better urban policing strategies and tactics.

The official advised Local Governments to take the lead in areas not fully covered by the police.

“One obvious example is the issue of designing, planning and maintaining public facilities and infrastructure, such as light and roads.

“The Local Government has to allocate resources, both financial and human, to achieve an effective cooperation with the police and other actors in the society to provide a safe and secured environment.

“The police must see itself as a civic organisation that is created to provide safety and protection from crime and violence to the citizens,’’ Badiane said.

He advised the leadership of Nigeria police Force to decentralise police operations at different levels of government.

“This is a Force that is in charge of 140 million people. It is not easy to understand the need of various communities and I think that the idea of decentralisation is key to a better security system,’’ he said.

He also suggested the establishment of a state police and even municipal police in major cities like Abuja, Lagos, Kaduna and kano.

“Such municipalities should have police that would be accountable to the state police including the federal police,’’ he said.

He stressed that decentralisation was imperative because “you cannot police 140 million people from Abuja’’.

Badiane recommended that the Nigeria Police should move from Police Force to Police Service.

According to him, it is unconstitutional, in a democratic society, to have a police force, instead of a police service because the police are expected to render services to the leaders and citizens.

He also advised people in the urban areas to maintain “a good working relationship with the police’’.

According to him, the search aids being used by the police to monitor criminal activities cannot solve problems of urban crime and violence.

“Some people use heavy fence and gates, but that does not mean you are safe.’’

While decrying the rising wave of crime in the cities, experts have blamed that development on poverty, as they observed that many idle people migrate to the cities on daily basis.

They blamed the rise in insecurity on the breakdown of socio-cultural bonds and the development of urban ghettos.

According to UN Habitat, between 1996 and 2020, the urban population is expected to double from 229 to 525 million.

“With such rising figures comes the challenges of increasing poverty, inadequate shelter and basic urban services.

“There will also be the degradation of the environment as well as the natural resources base.’’

Dr Slawomir Redo, the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer of UNODC, who also spoke at the Abuja meeting, advocated the rotation of manpower among government security agencies to check corruption.

According to him, “keeping a security official for too long in a position is capable of luring him into corruption’’.He said that such corruption made it impossible to effectively carry out justice or punish offenders as most officials got compromised.

To check crime in the cities, he said that UNODC was implementing a 32 million dollar project of the European Commission to develop the EFCC and the judiciary in 10 states of Nigeria.

“The move will develop EFCC’s operational, analytical, training and information technology capacity and support improved judicial integrity measures,’’ he said.In his contribution, Alhaji Ibrahim Lame, the Minister of Police Affairs, identified poor physical planning and management of cities as factors contributing to growing insecurity.

“The development poses enormous challenges to effective policing,’’ he said.

Noting that half of humanity is already living in urban areas, he said that the Federal Government had set aside N2.8 billion to address challenges facing the police in the areas of training, transportation and other logistics.

“Government is also worried that more than 100,000 policemen are deployed to protect private individuals instead of being sent to the streets to control and prevent crime,’’ he said.

To help the police to do a better job, he suggested that city and town planners should involve the Police Force in planning cities.

“This will go a long way in helping the police to know the entry and exit points of such cities.’’

Also speaking, Mr John Haruna, the FCT Commissioner of Police, said that the police was running courses on community/police relations as well as urban crime prevention.

“The members of the public are expected to provide information to the police through phone calls and suggestion boxes,’’ he said, adding that such assistance would help to identify the causes of crimes and ways to tackle them.

(NANFeatures)