President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday, June 22, 2015 ordered all soldiers withdrawal from checkpoints across highways the nation. Following this, the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, has deployed 138 police patrol teams to make up for the vacuum that the dismantled military roadblocks would create.
The IG said that this deployment would complement the already deployed 300 patrol teams last month with the aim of combating terrorism, armed robbery and kidnapping. He made this revelation at the open workshop organised to improve police response to gender and sexual related violence and gender mainstreaming on Tuesday, June 23, 2015 in Abuja.
“We are deploying 138 patrol teams in addition to the 300 teams that were earlier deployed across the nation, to enable us secure the highways more effectively; this is meant to fill the vacuum created by the dismantling of military checkpoints,” he stated.
According to him, the Force had also designed more strategies to handle crime related cases in the country. He said that they were creating avenues to address gender-based crimes and that there was a technical platform currently being developed to enable the public to report gender-based violence and sexual crimes without having to go to the police station.
He said that the platform was supported by the Ford Foundation which provided the sum of $300,000 for the implementation of the project while noting that the police did not have the adequate capacity to investigate those types of crimes and that with the development of this technical platform, policemen would no longer need to ask victims of sexual crimes awkward questions.
Arase reiterated the commitment of the police is to protect every member of the society and that the Force would no longer discriminate against anyone based on their gender. He also stated that he found some of the policies in the Force repugnant and that steps were being taken to correct the anomalies that allowed a male officer to marry right off from the police college whereas a female officer could only marry when she had served for a number of years.
“We are committed to the protection of men, women and children and we won’t accept any policy that discriminates against women, like the policy that prevents female police officers from getting married for a period of time, while their male counterparts can get married even while in police college. However, any law that is against the constitution is a nullity,” Arase noted.
The Assistant Commissioner of Police, Gender Advisor, Olabisi Kolawole also informed the journalists that the creation of the gender unit has gone a long way to inspire female officers to aspire to great heights alongside their male counterparts. She also called on stakeholders to help the force to build capacity for deployed personnel to the police force.
