Former Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase (rtd), has said the country needs an extra 300,000 policemen to be able to successfully implement the new shift in work arrangement that would make a policeman work for only eight hours daily.
Speaking at the weekend in an interview, the retired police boss said, “The figure is difficult to prescribe because if you have a strength of 300,000, you are looking at having additional 300,000 again and that’s not feasible within the space of four years, because you have to start recruiting about 10,000 officers per recruitment exercise over a period of time.
“Even if you recruit 10,000 men each time, how long will that take you and the (training) schools can’t accommodate the recruits.
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“The main thing is thinking outside the box, having more of technical platform, using intelligence, using motorised patrols. All these are the issues they should be talking about now”.
Arase suggested the redeployment of redundant officers at the Force Headquarters, the zonal formations and other commands to fill the quota for the new shift work proposed by the Acting Inspector General of Police, Abubakar Adamu.
He said, “They could push them into operations. He (Adamu) can take them to areas of need. That could be an interim arrangement”.
He noted that the police had about 350,000 operational personnel, a percentage of which protects private individuals.
Arase pointed out that modern policing was not about numerical strength, but the deployment of technology.
“If you look at most of the crises that have happened across the world, the detection of those crises was dependent on how robust the technical platform is,” he added.
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