After he was named the new Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, recently, many people felt an unknown crime fighter was coming on saddle. In fact, some concluded that the new man will definitely operate on a strange terrain little knowing that an eagle has landed.

The new police boss in the state,  Commissioner of Police, Fatai Ajani Oweseni, has an intimidating resume and background, having traversed almost all the nooks and crannies of the country doing police work. This is coupled with sterling achievements he recorded during his postings overseas. These he has brought to bear in Lagos, reputed not be an easy beat to police. He spoke with our Crime Editor, Emma Nnadozie. Excerpts: 

Lagos CP, Fatai Owoseni

When you were announced Commissioner of Police, Lagos State command, what was your immediate reaction, taking cognizance of the fact that Lagos is a very volatile state? As with every other posting, every police duty   comes with its own peculiar challenges. When the posting to Lagos came, I was like we are going onto the field, we have been part of what is happening in Force Headquarters in broad view of what is going on in the country and Lagos state.

To also come and work in the field and put into practice some of the ideas that we have gained working with senior officers, and under their guidance at Force Headquarters, it’s like coming to put them into practice in the state.

How do you view the challenges ahead generally?

There are always challenges in the world all over. In every assignment you have, there will always be challenges. So, while looking at the challenges, I also have the attitude that they are not insurmountable.

What should Lagosians expect from you in terms of fighting crime, and with what new innovations?

Policing worldwide is changing strategies and the methods with which policing is carried out around the world are changing. It is more of being pro-active now as the Inspector-General of Police has rolled out the policy thrust of his own  administration. It is about more engagement and partnership with non-state actors and  members of the community in policing the country. It is more about deploying technology to address the issues of crime and criminality.

It is more of intelligence-based policing, intelligence-based investigation and knowledge-based policing. It is not about fire-brigade approach, it is about looking at trends of crime, studying them, analyzing them, and addressing with other stakeholders, identifying the root causes and how these root causes can be addressed with other non-state actors in preventing crime. It is all about making sure that we get our facts right before we react.

It is all about diligently investigating cases that we cannot prevent; that is the focus. That is what we have been working on. When I took over, I said I would focus more on preventive measures and I stuck to that and when you prevent, you have less crime.  While preventing, one of the things that we do to get to the grass roots is to carry the members of the public, the non- state actors along in our policing strategy, to get their input and improving on police visibility, improving on the response time.

Where we cannot prevent and it happens, improving response time to incidents that are reported, and ensuring that measures are put in place for quick detection and diligent investigation, and ensuring successful prosecution of cases and, of course, getting involved with members of the community, sensitizing them on how they can support us, and what they can do to reduce crime and criminality.

In practical terms, could you appraise what you have done so far?

It has been some six weeks now. We have focused on traffic management because that is one of the major challenges the command and state government are facing. We have tried to put more of our personnel especially, during peak periods on the road for traffic management in collaboration with other traffic management agencies like the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority,  LASTMA, etc. I have also had a lot of engagement with members of the public, interacting with them because that is one of the ways we promote community policing.

Getting to hear from them, what their concerns are and how we can jointly address these concerns. I have also embarked on improving police visibility by getting our patrol vehicles on the roads. Another major problem that we have encountered is the issue of robbing motorists in traffic.      It is a gradual process but we have tried as much as possible to reduce it and I believe that within a short time, we should be able to eradicate it completely because we have been able to put in place more policemen in order to give confidence to motorists.

In the areas where these things are endemic, Oshodi Bridge, and Ojota, Mile Two, we have been putting more policemen around there. With the latest empowerment by the Lagos State Government that has given us motorcycles, we are deploying these motorcycles on these roads to check this menace of robbing people on the highways.

Of course, engaging the personnel in discussion and re-orienting them, in trying to change their attitude  in other to make sure that what they do are within the ambits of the law and police regulations and, of course, the laws of the country. Those ones that have corrupt tendencies, we have been checking them.    I have been going round personally and we have operatives on the road. The X-squad is equally up and doing.  While we are doing that, the present management of the Force is also taking their welfare into consideration.

That is why a whole lot of measures have been put in place to ensure that their welfare is addressed. If you deploy people on patrol, at least, you give them some relative comfort in terms of making provisions for rations for them, even if it is ordinary bottle water for them to carry along.      That is what the Inspector- General of Police introduced, which is what we are replicating here to ensure that we don’t allow them to resort to self-help in fuelling their patrol vans.

The IG has been making provision for that. We have also tried to strengthen our internal oversight control on personnel that run foul of the police regulations. The Public Complaints Bureau has been strengthened by putting a Chief Superintendent of Police with integrity. He also has a legal background as a lawyer to be addressing complaints by the public.

That is to ensure that personnel that are found wanting in one way or the other and combined to that, to put it into place for alternate dispute resolution which the present management of the force is adopting to reduce incidence of cases that are otherwise not criminal but can lead to a breach of peace such as land cases.

You talked about prevention, but there are certain situations that you cannot prevent, like this Boko Haram issue now, DSS says Boko Haram is in Lagos. What measures are you putting in place to safeguard the people of Lagos? The DSS have said that, the Police have not said that. Let’s hope that the DSS probably has its reasons for saying that there is Boko Haram in Lagos.

So, you are already taking preventive measures?

We have been doing that and we will continue to do that.      I have personally met with the residents and home owners in Festac. We distributed pamphlets to them. We briefed them on personal security. We told them about the menace of okada riders and street hawkers. These are people groups which some criminal elements can infiltrate.

What are you going to do about human right abuses, torture inside the cells especially at the Special Anti-robbery sections?

I have not recorded such cases, but like I have told you, we have strengthened our internal mechanism in Lagos State. We have used external mechanism in organizing the kind of orientation programme at the training school, because we believe that it is not just about punitive measures or tackling policemen who have infringed on people’s rights, it is not about reducing their ranks but ,making them to know what is good.

After we might have managed the matter, we send them to training school to learn about human rights and ensure that they are corrected.    We are also working on getting psychologists to talk to them. Every human being has some sort of madness which can manifest at times and, of course, the society is already heated up. An average person in Lagos is charged because of the pressure, the social and economic thing and domestic problems; you don’t know what the man encountered before he left his house.

That is why I want to use this medium to appeal to members of the public, who are policemen, our children, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, husbands and wives. The policeman is from the society. They are recommended by the traditional rulers and the local government chairman attests to the form that the policeman completed before they join the police. It is something that we have to do together. In the recent past, you must have been briefed about dare- devil armed robbers that attacked from the creeks. Twice, they devastated Lagos.

Though, there were claims of arrest, Lagosians are afraid that they may strike again.  What are you doing about it?

Crime cannot be completely eradicated. Lagos with its size, its 21 million people, with the number of policemen and logistic challenges we have and with increased number of migration to Lagos, it is only a place where you don’t have human activities that you would say that they don’t have crimes at all. So, what we have been doing in other to see that we prevent such is engaging people. I have met with private jetty owners. They see these people while they come and go.

I have also engaged especially with banks by interactions, by raising the awareness and security consciousness, how to quickly alert the police when they notice anything happening. We have also engaged our special anti-robbery squads as well, on the need to change strategies to address some of these issues. I have met with the chief security officers of oil companies, multinationals and the embassies. We are all working together in order to hatch strategy and prevent such from happening again. If they happen again, to have effective response to such attacks.

Those are the things that we are doing; coupled with raids on different identified criminal hideouts including abandoned buildings, abandoned vehicles on the roads where some of these criminals keep the weapons with which they operate. We will sustain that raiding and I believe that with all that, we will be able to come on top of such situations. Fighting crime now is not about the numbers of guns or ammunition that you have.

One of the most potent tools missing nowadays is information. In fact, good credible information is even better. Our marine police are also popping their activities in doing patrols. We don’t have enough boats but the few they have, they have been sustaining patrols on the waterways.

Let’s talk about cult wars, it looks like community policing has failed in that area?

I will disagree with that; they are reducing. I have positively engaged with members of the community in some of those areas, including the chairmen of local governments. They have given us credible information, information they have withheld before. In Bariga, Fadeyi, Mushin, and last week alone at Idi-Oro, two were arrested with machetes.

In Ikorodu, we arrested some with axes. Just yesterday, one of the notorious cultists was arrested by the Area commander in Ogudu and in the course of investigations, they found out that this particular person has been arrested before and because of the fact that we want to observe human rights, he was given administrative bail, and his file sent to DPP and the DPP’s advice came for him to be prosecuted for murder and since then, they have not been able to lay hands on him.

Another notorious one that always operate around Fadeyi and Shomolu was also arrested. We have sustained our raids on them. We picked quite a lot and we have been taking them to court. We have been looking at those of them that have hands in previous murder cases in the state. Because one of the things that people complain about is that they know that the police actually arrest felons, but when they arrest, these people do come back. We don’t have control over the judiciary.

The judiciary will do their work, they sentence them to jail terms or whatever and they come back to commit. But we are working on that because there are some of them that actually have links with previous unresolved murder cases, some capital offences which is why we do a profiling of them.

I have engaged landlords, community leaders, people on the street, some of them are coming up with credible facts and some send me sms. My number is in the public domain — 08023265021 — and to people that you know things are changing now, we also have platforms on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and, in fact, if things are happening they can put it there. I am assuring everybody that as we read these things, we will respond.

What is your response to allegations that some policemen fuel gang wars?

That is why I told you that we have strengthened our internal oversight mechanism by empowering the X-squad and the provost to identify those miscreants in uniform and we will make sure that with your help — some of you know them — we will get them out of the service and out of uniform. The police with its size, even in a  a family of about seven or ten you have deviants. So, if you take the size of the police you will find some of those deviants.

We will use this platform to also appeal to the public that when recommending people to join the Police Force during recruitment, also be truthful for God’s sake. There is no Baale or Kabiyesi (traditional rulers) that have ever written on a form to say that this person you want to employ is a troublesome person, some are even assisting them in forging their age to join the Police. You can see that all of us have a hand in some of these things. So people should help us to also get rid of that.

Recently, the President spoke about CCTV to curb crime. I know we used to have it here, what is the state of the CCTV?

An evaluation of that system has been done, and the Lagos State Government is working on that, not just on this but to improve on it. An elaborate system is being planned to cover Lagos state. By the time it is rolled out very soon, the governor will be talking about it. I want to think that Lagos will be the first to have such a system and in addition to that, everyone will say in the UK and in the US this is how they do things. We have been encouraging private business owners, especially banks, it doesn’t cost much to install CCTV.

An example of where that has helped us to diffuse tension, was about two or three weeks ago at Bariga where there was this killing. There was a car laden with bomb in front of GT bank. What the police did was that the Area commander went there and was able to activate the CCTV footage, found that a woman with two of her children went to the bank premises, just parked and left. This raised security consciousness in people because the bank had private security operatives who were not aware that such a thing was happening.

It was from the CCTV that we were able to find out that the security guard was sleeping in the back of the car. From there, we were also able to get the woman because the Area commander now had to get IED experts to look at the car. We took the car to the station. CCTV helped us to know somehow the figure of the person and the woman showed up and it seemed as if she was just distressed, in her distress, she looked for the most convenient place to put her car. Unfortunately, the security guard of the company did not challenge her, he was not even there when this woman parked her car.

Are you aware that your men have nicknamed you CP human right?

I am happy to hear that. That is to also let you know that we are trying our best to ensure that we do things in accordance with the law and to also make sure that the rule of law comes to play.