Police Week Holds 31 October

Altus Global Alliance and its member organisation in Nigeria, Cleen Foundation are set for Altus’s Annual Police Station Visitors’ Week, PSVW which takes place in police stations all over the world.

The Altus Global programme for police station visitors’ week was established in 2004 to promote safety and justice around the world from a multicultural perspective.

It is an international programme organised to facilitate local community groups visiting police stations and assessing the quality of services delivered by police department to identify best practices to strengthen the accountability of police to the local community.

According to the Chief executive of Altus Global Alliance, Mr. Innocent Chukwuma, “the programme has been going on annually all over the world for the past five years and this year’s police station visitors’ week is to promote clean service and other issues like the killing of the late Divisional Police Officer in Badagry by a military officer without the culprit being brought to justice and some other innocent police officers that died during service without their killers brought to book.

“Solutions would also be proferred for the issue of rape, poor people who are marginalize for other reasons and other relevant humanitarian issues.

This year’s police station visitors’ week is taking place in different countries across the 5 continents, a total of 21 countries are participating. These are Ghana, Liberia, Republic of Benin, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Cameroun, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, India, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, USA, Russia and Latvia.

The stations would be assessed by using simple assessment tool composed of 20 questions based in five human right areas which are community orientation physical condition equal treatment of the public, transparency and accountability, and detention conditions.

Many of the visitors would be female and people with detention experiences.The experiences according to Mr. Chukwuma would provide their first real access to local law enforcement and a platform for expressing their views about whether the police are serving all members of their community.

This 2011 PSVW is scheduled to hold from 31 October to 6 November. In Nigeria, over 700 visitors would be visiting 192 Police Divisional Headquarters in Lagos, Imo, Kano, and the Federal Capital Territory.

Three hundred and thirty two police stations would be part of the visit from the participating countries and over one thousand visitors would be mobilized to visit participating police stations in Africa.

There would be state-based results by the second week of December and national award at the end of the year. Since 2006 two police stations have won the award of the best in Nigeria and West Africa are Ilupeju and Badagry police stations.

—Lucky Lawal