POLICE PROTEST VIPS’ ILL-TREATMENT OF SECURITY DETAILS

The police hierarchy has condemned the continued poor treatment of men and officers attached to top politicians and government functionaries. Some aggrieved senior police officers told LEADERSHIP Sunday that majority of VIPs who request for security details or are entitled to be provided security personnel, end up treating them shabbily.
“This police hierarchy had at a time when this incident was reported by officers specified what should be the duties of the men detailed to any VIP and warned that it would not tolerate any deviation from the official duties, whether willingly or by compulsion. Unfortunately, these people have no regards for the men sent to secure them and their families,” a worried officer said.
He continued: “Can you imagine a situation where a senior public servant who is assigned a number of policemen to protect his family, turning them to gate keepers, expecting them to be opening gate for them and their family members and never care about their welfare? Some of these policemen come from as far as Suleja in Niger State and Gwagwalada in the FCT to resume work with these people and they will keep them till late night. They do not even bother to give them water to drink not to talk of paying their transport fare to-and-fro. One of them, a very senior government official even asked our men to follow his wife to the market to help carry the things she was going to buy. How do you explain that? Is that the right attitude to those you expect to secure you and your family?” the embittered officer said.
He cited cases of the gross abuse of security details attached as that involving a former female minister of state, a serving senator and permanent secretary in a very strategic federal government office.
“The former minister had about six policemen assigned to her whom she reduced to her domestic servants. She kept them in the open without any form of shade even in the rain and the heat of the sun. She got infuriated when the men refused to take her orders to run domestic errands,” the source recounted, adding that the men could not stand such inhuman treatment and reported the situation to the command. “Of course, the police authority was compelled to withdraw them. The woman in rage threatened to report to higher police authority, but we insisted on not returning the men to her until she came to apologise.”
When LEADERSHIP Sunday contacted the force deputy public relations officer, CSP Frank Mba on the matter, he said: “Those policemen are legitimately attached to the VIPs as security details to provide security to these personalities and their families. While on that assignment, they are expected to perform their duties in line with the mandate from the command, which is precisely, core security duties and nothing beyond that.
It will amount to breach of police code of conduct for police officers to willingly allow themselves to engage in any other extra security task. And it will also amount to a breach of the condition of deployment on the part of their principals to either compel them or blackmail them or stampede them or in any way to push them into any other duty outside their citizen security task.”
Source: Leadership