Community Policing And Policing The Community: The Missing Link In Nigeria's Security Architecture

The Nigerian State can now be described as a nation at war with itself. The country has inadvertently plunged into a kind of asymmetrical warfare with various armed non-state actors contending with the soul of the nation and angling to share its sovereignty. In the midst of the multifaceted security that confront the nation is the call for effective community policing. However, rather than encourage and practice community policing with a view to mitigating insecurity, what is seen from the Nigeria police Force is the act of policing the community. Certainly, community policing preaches inclusion, cooperation and partnership in the business of fishing out criminally minded members of the society. Whilst policing the community tends to emasculate, intimidate and alienate the citizens thereby, denying itself the benefits of sourcing and eliciting intelligence reports and vital information from the residents. Under policing the community, the police only report to the scene of crime long after the harm had been done. This is because, rather than being proactive, policing the community is reactive. This paper has adopted a variety of community police theories such as normative sponsorship; the broken window; and social resource theories.Relying on the secondary sources of data, this paper has x-rayed all the nuances and dimensions of combating crimes in Nigeria and the utility of community policing. This study contends that the current approach of policing the community is counterproductive. The paper recommends that genuine and concerted efforts toward community policing is the only antidote to the frequent breakdown of law and order and other violent crimes in Nigeria.