There’s been lots of clamor lately regarding “excessive use of force” by police units, especially with regard to Tasers. While I agree that there’s lots of Taser-overuse out there today due to lack of proper discipline, procedure, and training, people in the U.S. need to realize that in general their society has very good police. Even if you live in Chicago where the police are really on the ropes these days, you have to admit that police in the U.S. are by and large a respectable group that upholds the honor and nobility of their profession.
Not so in Nigeria, where there is an on-going crisis with the national police force. In Nigeria, thousands of suspects are killed every year ex-judicially by police, including many that die after release due to injuries from torture. An even more disturbing trend is the idea that raping sex workers is “a fringe benefit of night patrol”. The more you read about Nigeria’s police force the more atrocities you will discover. The crime wave sweeping the country has prompted the Nigerian government to bring in British police to supplement the decidedly sub-par (understatement of the decade) performance of the Nigerian police. This is far from a solution, and is in fact a recipe for disaster. The mind boggles when considering what it would take to really fix this problem.
From our perspective, it’s important to remember that ultimately morality and ethics are the foundation of society. The Nigerian police force is plagued by a complete disregard for the rights of the people they are supposed to protect. We thankfully live in a society where life, liberty, and property are highly respected and/or upheld as sacred. These ideals can erode if they are not protected, however, and moral decay in our own society will eventually lead to a Nigerian type of situation where nobody is really safe at all.
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