Funke Busari, Lagos
The Inspector-General of Police, IGP Usman Alkali Usman Baba during his visit to the Lagos State Police Command Headquarters in Ikeja on Wednesday urged police officers to prevent, control and maintain law and order in the State.
The police boss told the officers of the rank and file to perform their policing duties in compliance with his vision and mission.
Reeling out the measures on how the police force will be run by the present police management under his leadership, he said, “While we do that as professionals, there are things we need to take into consideration in discharging such duties.
“We need to remind ourselves of the enormous tasks of policing under a democratic dispensation.
“It is a known fact that we have not gotten all that we need to discharge our duties and responsibilities. Personnel, equipment and other things. Be that as it may, with the limited resources we have and personnel, we are going to do our job with more dedication and professionalism.
“I want to congratulate us that more than ever before, the government and people of Nigeria has taken cognisance of our duties and responsibilities and we have the support of every Nigerian that we are quite necessary to maintain law and order in society.
“I want to state that there are a lot of measures government has put in place, in term of personnel increase, logistics and welfare.”
He intimated that the Force will be recruiting more officers very soon.
Speaking, IGP Baba said, “For the avoidance of doubt with personnel and recruit into the force at all cadre will begin very soon, as for equipment and working tools, we just started taking delivery of riot equipment, vehicles and other fundamental tools from the police trust fund. PTF does not have all the money to get the needed equipment at the same time, but they are coming.
“There is going to be training and retraining, intervention in logistics and welfare. Our funding and budgetary allocation has been seriously looked into and I think we have more than we have even gotten in budgetary allocation this year.
“With all these we need to restore our professional onion by way of discharging our responsibility lies through intelligent led policing, through technology based practices from our operations to investigations.
“We will also go by the enabling laws that gives us power to discharge our responsibilities. We must take care of our human relations training capacity. We are working on enhancing our pension after service and police housing.
He noted further thus, “While we work on barrack renovation and reconstruction, we are also working on housing scheme officers will be retiring to after service. The bedrock of this organisation, NPF is discipline. As strategic managers and officers in this business of policing we need to enforce serious discipline. There must be motivation and there must be punishment as deterrent. The service can no longer tolerate acts of indiscipline which is not know to us.
He also added, “When officer serving under you display zeal and courage, encourage them.
“One area we need to improve on is the issue of crowd control, riot, so that you go back to the acceptable norm of discharging duties and responsibilities. You must also control the use of firearms. You need to monitor your men, Force Order 247 has been reviewed, so you need to educate your men and remind them that once you are assigned a rifle, there is time and reason for its use.
“Guard it diligently and don’t misuse it. You must also be civil in discharging our responsibility, never again do we allow our stations and personnel be overrun to the extent that we will not be able to handle situations because of cowardice or lack of professionalism. Note that officers have a great city to perform and we must perform it diligently.”
Earlier CASEFILE TV reported about the narrow escape of guests as wind and rain had journalists and guests scampering for safety when some canopies collapsed under the weight of the heavy rain.
