Two weeks ago mass protests erupted across the country calling for the scrapping of Nigeria Police Force’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS. The demonstrators expressed their anger and frustration at the police high command’s refusal or failure to bring SARS under control in spite of constant hue and cry over its high-handedness. SARS was established to checkmate armed robbery, kidnapping, communal and religious violence in the country but citizens now believe that it operates beyond the borders of the law by engaging in torture and ill- treatment of suspects.
SARS operatives are accused of employing methods that include severe beating, hanging, starvation, shooting in the legs, mock executions and threats of execution in order to extract confessional statements from victims. In the process, some victims have lost their lives and others have been physically and psychologically scarred. The mass protests and online outrage attracted the attention of the high and mighty in country, leading to the Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris’ promise to appoint a Commissioner of Police to head it and subject those under the unit to training.
Operatives of SARS carry out their inhuman interrogation behind the finger-size cover of what is termed Force Order 237. Under this regulation, police officers have the permission to shoot suspects and detainees who attempt to escape or avoid arrest, whether or not the detainee poses a threat to life. Opinions of legal experts have situated the order as archaic and out of fashion with civilized world’s best practices, especially the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, OPCAT. As a way of admitting the illegality of the activities of SARS and other investigative arms, the police established the Complaint Response Unit, CRU in 2015 to “entrench police accountability” and “galvanize the citizens towards actively participating in the policing framework of the country.” CRU operates seven platforms for public complaints against the police: telephone calls, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, BBN, email and text messages. However, this measure did not curtail the brutality of SARS.
This recent outrage against SARS would not be the first in recent times. In 2016 Amnesty International published a revealing report of many cases of torture and extrajudicial killings that take place in SARS stations in Abuja, Enugu and Anambra states. The police did a push-back after publication of AI’s investigative but the majority of Nigerians, especially those who have had encounters with SARS, hailed the human rights body’s report as courageous and credible. Many Nigerians have been sent into their graves through the overzealousness and satanic orgy of some SARS operatives.
We do not advocate that SARS should be abrogated because the sophistication and plurality of criminal elements in this country require a tough response. It is in this context that we welcome the promise by the Inspector General to carry out a reform of the unit. In carrying out the changes to its operations, the police should harvest inputs from stakeholders, mainly human rights groups, judiciary and academia so that the reform could be broad, effective and implementable. Of course, hitherto, measures have been proffered and adopted to check the excesses of SARS but they had all died at the stage of implementation.
The starting point should be the implementation of the provision of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (2015) which provides in Section 8(1) that: a suspect must “(a) be accorded humane treatment, having regard to his right to the dignity of his person; and (b) not be subjected to any form of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Other sections of this Act insist that suspects should be allowed access to their lawyers before they make confessional statements. This is in line with international best practices and SARS should be made to imbibe it. Then also, it is vital to enhance the operatives’ skills and capacity for intelligence gathering. Without such capacity, SARS would continue to use brutality to extract confessions from suspects.
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