Dany Franck A. Tiwa,
Department of Urban Studies, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland; African Centre for Crime and Security Studies (ACCSS Africa), Yaoundé, Cameroon
ABSTRACT
This journal explores an effect of distrust of the police – unwillingness to rely on them for security and justice – on policing dynamics in contemporary Nigeria using a qualitative research design. It argues that policing according to formal prescriptions such as the Criminal Procedure Act is virtually impossible in contemporary Nigeria because of this pervasive public distrust. At the same time, police officers resort to informal processes that further undermine public trust in the criminal justice system and create a self-defeating cycle that allows many to justify support for or active participation in illegal forms of crime control, including lynching by mobs and extra-legal killing by security forces. This proposition is significant for policing studies in two ways. Firstly, it suggests a trust threshold that, when breached, leads to policing collapse. Despite widespread distrust, many police forces maintain order. Secondly, it reveals how distrust perpetuates itself, even amid attempts at reform in various countries.
KEYWORDS: Distrust, Nigeria Police Force, Policing Disorder
Introduction
The vast majority of Nigerians, irrespective of region, gender and social status, agree that the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is ineffective and dysfunctional.Footnote1 Undisciplined police repression during the #EndSARS movement against police brutality in 2021 further exposed its limitations as a peaceful protest become the scene of a massacre perpetuated by both the military and the police (Etim et al. Citation2022, p. 230, Richards and Eboibi Citation2023, p. 40). However, police brutality (Human Rights Watch (HRW/CLEEN) Citation2002, Human Rights Watch Citation2003, Amnesty International Citation2016) is only one manifestation of the policing crisis in the country and has been accompanied by phenomena including a proliferation of vigilante groups (Reno Citation2002, Harnischfeger Citation2008, Pratten Citation2008), mob lynching (Salihu and Gholami Citation2018, Tiwa Citation2022a, Citation2022b) and torture and extrajudicial killings by law enforcement (Human Rights Watch Citation2005, Citation2009, Agbiboa Citation2015b, Amnesty International Citation2016, Akinyetun Citation2021). With so many issues, it is no surprise that a 2016 survey of 127 countries by the World Internal Security and Police Index ranked the NPF as the worst national police force in the world.Footnote2
This situation is perplexing as most Nigerian regimes have advocated for police reform ever since independence from Great Britain in 1960 (Hills Citation2012, p. 746).Footnote3 In addition, multiple agreements and joint projects with many development partnersFootnote4 and numerous public statements suggest that police leadership supports police reforms. Moreover, since the restoration of democracy in 1999 international donors have – at the request of elected officials and appointed police chiefs – liberally funded programmes to improve the capacity of the NPF and make it more accountable to people and communities (Hills Citation2008, Citation2012). However, these reforms have had little impact, leading one to ask why disorder in the Nigeria policing sector has been so intractable despite all the support for reforms and international financial assistance.
On the one hand, core reforms to the Nigeria public police are believed to have failed because of a lack of genuine political will. Those who hold political power in Nigeria have been portrayed as jealously guarding an institution that they inherited from past oppressive regimes (the colonial rulers and military junta) and continue to benefit from as a very effective instrument of political control and domination (Ahire Citation1990, Marenin Citation1993). According to Hills (Citation2008, p. 222)
Public statements about the desirability of reform on the part of politicians and senior officers are arguably better understood as indicating tactical adjustment to unavoidable political pressures, than as genuine political commitment to fundamental reforms that would diminish their power and resources.
However, others have argued that rank-and-file officers have resisted and effectively sabotaged reforms for reasons ranging from economic survival to police subculture. Many observers have assumed that the ideals of ‘honesty’, ‘service’, ‘integrity’ and others that senior officers have often attempted to push through were doomed to have little to no resonance among their subordinates because of the dire material conditions under which they lived.(Hills Citation2008, p. 224, Oluwaniyi Citation2011, Agbiboa Citation2015a, Aborisade and Gbahabo Citation2021).
These explanations are valid and valuable but also one-sided. Both blame individuals (rank-and-file police, senior officers, political elites, etc.) whom they portray as insincere or dubious, even as they frame their behaviour as understandable within their socio-economic context. Blaming individuals for social and institutional problems often leads to problematising their very characters. Consider the argument according to which Nigerian political elites benefit from keeping the police weak, which implies that they would not be able to control a strong and effective police force like political elites in, say (western) Europe or (North) America. It is not so difficult to see the deeply rooted othering bias that underlies this kind of argument.
This paper seeks to show how police reform has been unsuccessful in Nigeria despite the good will of the main actors involved in the day-to-day production and reproduction of policing: the police and the public. Using mob vigilantism – a type of policing disorder in which people take the law into their own hands – as an entry point, and building on a burgeoning literature on public-police trust, the paper seeks to answer two simple but far-reaching questionsFootnote5: what do people mean when they say they do not trust the police and how does this distrust affect policing?
Although the research on public-police trust (see the next section for an elaborated definition of trust) has grown rapidly in the past two decades, comprehensive responses to these fundamental questions are still hard to find in the literature.
On the one hand, policing scholars take it for granted that public trust is necessary for effective and efficient policing and prefer to focus on the drivers of public trust and distrust, along with their determinants, correlates and so on, (Sunshine and Tyler Citation2003, Hohl et al. Citation2010, Tankebe Citation2013, Mason et al. Citation2014, Nix et al. Citation2015) to advise on how public trust can ‘be activated to ensure that the police are regarded as legitimate’ (Gilmour Citation2008, p. 51). As Oberwittler and Roche (Citation2018, p. 3) rightly note when discussing the hugely influential impact procedural justice research on our understanding of police-citizen relationships, ‘it may neither help us to fully grasp the sources of trust in the police and police legitimacy, nor always be suitable for understanding police-citizen relations in different countries’. In any case, because of policing studies overall focus on ‘what works’ (see Brodeur Citation2010), a fine-grained understanding of what people mean when they say they do not trust the police depends on looking beyond policing research and criminology more generally.
Conversely, the body of research (mostly by anthropologists of security in developing countries) that offers most insights into the situated meanings and behavioural translations of distrust of the police tends to ‘take the failings of state policing institutions as a given and explore instead the alternative, non-state means through which (people) conceive of and seek security’ (Beek et al. Citation2017 Also see preface by Loader, P. xvii). Consequentially, this knowledge is typically one-sided and tends to legitimate alternative, non-state forms of policing (see Kirsch and Grätz Citation2010).
This paper brings these thematic concerns (people’s situated definition(s) of police untrustworthiness, their behavioural responses to such definition(s), and the impact of the latter on policing dynamics) into the same analytical frame and examines them simultaneously. The analysis focuses on the interaction order (Goffman Citation1983) that governs the encounters between people and the police, as well as the symbols that epitomise public-police distrust and shapes policing dynamics. Guided by these interactionist lenses, the paper shows that pervasive distrust of the police makes policing based on formal prescriptions like the Criminal Procedure Act virtually impossible in contemporary Nigeria. Instead, police officers find it more effective to resort to the same informal practices that undermine public trust in the criminal justice system.Footnote6 I call this self-defeating cycle, which allows many police and citizens to justify supporting or actively participating in illegal forms of crime control such as mob lynching and extra-legal killings, an institutional distrust trap.
This proposition’s significance for policing studies is twofold. First, it hints at the possible existence of a trust threshold below which policing virtually collapses. Indeed, police organisations are notoriously distrusted across the world, except in a few developed countries (mainly Nordic European countries).Footnote7 Yet despite this low level of public trust, many of these police forces seem able to maintain a relative degree of public order and avoid major policing disorder of the kind that has afflicted Nigeria for decades. Second, the paper sheds light on a mechanism through which distrust of the police sustains itself, even when the parties involved may be trying to appear trustworthy – as has been the case with police reform initiatives in many low – and middle-income and post-authoritarian countries (see Goldsmith Citation2005).