Inspector General of Police, Alhaji Mohammed Abubakar, yesterday disclosed that the art and science of policing cannot be perfected in modern days without intelligence. He added that any police department that lacks strong intelligence capacity can never achieve its constitutional mandate.
He however said that such police can never meet the expectations, nor gain the confidence of the citizens which it was established to serve and protect.
Alhaji Abubakar also commended President Goodluck Jonathan over the approval of the establishment of the Force Intelligence Bureau saying: “This is a further testimony of Mr President’s resolve to re-position the police in line with the transformation agenda for the entire country”.
The IGP stated this during the ground-breaking ceremony of the Force Intelligence Institute held at Share, headquarters of Ifelodun Local Government of Kwara State.
According to him, “Within the Nigerian Policing landscape, it has been asserted by a spectrum of Nigerian society that the most fundamental challenge of the Nigeria Police is its inability to evolve a professionally active Intelligence Unit since the excision of the then special branch from the force in 1976 to form what has today metamorphosed into the Department of State Security, DSS.
“This challenge has remained not because successive leadership of the force did not pursue initiatives aimed at re-positioning the unit. Rather, the challenge remained because in its 87 years of existence, the Nigeria Police Force lacked a training institution established exclusively for criminal and security intelligence research activities and capacity development of an intelligence corps for the force”.
The police boss further added that identification, recruitment, retention, monitoring and exposure of operatives to international best practices and dynamics of intelligence and enforcement of operational standards for the unit on a sustainable became a worrying decimal due to the missing links.