Government and the license to rob

WITH the litany of cases of bare-faced mugging of innocent citizens being allegedly perpetrated by errant policemen under official cover, it is not out of place to surmise that they have been granted the license to rob. The frequency and impunity around the devious act in recent times are so frightening as to cast doubts on the expectation that the police do not have official permission to add extortion of money from citizens to their official mandate. The strategy is simple: the offending police personnel profile the young men they accost, brand them as internet fraudsters or cybercriminals and check their cell phones and/laptops for incriminating pieces of evidence. Notwithstanding the outcome of their scrutiny, the victims must part with their money; the amount involved often depends on the perceived financial position of the victims. And in cases where credit/debit alerts reveal huge balances on the account of the victims, the police go for the kill. The negotiation and extortion are carried out at gunpoint! Stubborn victims are tortured, brutalised and made to have a sense of powerlessness, including the veritable risk of losing their lives.

Two or three recent incidents would suffice. Sometimes last month, public outrage greeted the torture and extortion of a young man, Olumide Bakare, by men of the Ogudu Division of the Lagos State Police Command. He was unlawfully arrested, tortured and extorted by the unscrupulous policemen to the tune of N260,000, being the negotiated sum from an initial demand of N500, 000 by the police. Citizen Bakare was somewhat lucky as the money extorted from him was later recovered and refunded when the authorities waded in following public outcry, but the culprits are reportedly back at their desks. Early this month, one Adebola took to social media to narrate his harrowing experience at the hands of policemen who had inscriptions of Eleweran SCIID on their shirts. He claimed that the policemen extorted N300,000 from him when he and his younger brother were taking their sick mother to hospital in Abeokuta. As usual, they were profiled as yahoo boys and forced to make video confessions in that regard, stating clearly that the police did not take any money from them.

Recently, too, there was the case of National Diploma 2 student of Auchi Polytechnic, Nicholas Victor, who accused some policemen attached to the Kogi State Police Command of extorting money from him because he owned two phones. Unfortunately, the poor boy did not have the kind of money they thought he had and he had to call his  mother, said to be a single parent, on phone to negotiate with the extortioners who allegedly forced her to transfer N70,000 into the account of one of the officers, identified as John Eshiobugie.  That was another case of robbery at gunpoint which, by implication, is tantamount to government robbing citizens. The logic is lucid: if the policemen did not have authority, Citizen Victor and many other victims of extortion would not obey them. This has been the sordid lot of many young men in the country courtesy of law enforcement agents who by their actions are lawbreakers.

From all indications, only an insignificant few of the distasteful narratives of police extortion of innocent citizens are reported: the majority of the victims simply count their losses in financial and psychological terms and try to move on. The painful fact that erring officers often come out of the deplorable act more or less unscathed has tended to reinforce the belief in some quarters that extortion of innocent citizens has the official stamp of approval. And the implication is grave: the society is unwittingly breeding a crop of disgruntled and potentially disloyal youths who see the state and its agents as distrustful, hypocritical and callous. To be sure, the police have the authority to check criminal activities, including cybercrimes, in the society, but they surely are not permitted under the law to mete out any form of sanctions, let alone torturing and robbing suspects of their money using the insignia of their office and arms provided for them with taxpayers’ funds.

Perhaps it should be mentioned that lately, the seeming intensification of war against cybercrime in the homes of suspects, on the streets and on the highways has selfish and ignoble motivations at its root. The paramount but dastardly objective is to extort money, as the real cybercriminals who allegedly put some police officers on their payroll are offered ‘protection’ from harassment and arrest. It is rather strange and saddening that the police authorities seem unperturbed by the burgeoning cases of police harassment and extortion of innocent citizens, especially as the instruction to police operatives to stop irritating and checking electronic devices of  citizens on the streets is being observed in the breach. Unless the police headquarters gets its acts together and sincerely tackles the sneaky act, the current wave of torture and extortion of people under the guise of fighting cybercrimes will become permanently established. Unscrupulous policemen see it as a veritable source of filthy lucre, just like bail that is officially free but is a ready front for illegal revenue in virtually all police stations.

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