Following President Muhammadu Buhari’s order on Monday that all checkpoints by the military should be withdrawn nationwide, the Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, said he has deployed additional 138 police patrol vehicles to fill the vacuum that has been created.
Arase, who stated this on Tuesday in Abuja at a workshop on improving police response to sexual and gender-based violence and gender mainstreaming also said the deployment would complement the 300 patrol teams that were deployed nationwide last month to curb terrorism, armed robbery and kidnappings.
He stated that the police force had designed strategies and measures to tackle cases of crime and criminality in the country.
“We are deploying 138 patrol teams in addition to the 300 teams that were earlier deployed across the nation, to enable us secure the highways more effectively; this is meant to fill the vacuum created by the dismantling of military checkpoints,” he said.
Punch reports that he said the police are developing capacities to address gender-based crimes, adding that a technical platform is being designed to enable the public report cases of gender-based violence and sexual crimes without going to a police station.
Arase stated that the police are committed to protecting every member of the society, stressing that the force would not condone discrimination against anyone based on their gender.
He said that one of the repugnant policies he found in the police was the regulation which says a female officer could only marry after she had served a number of years in the force while their male counterparts could get married right from the police college, adding that steps were being taken to correct such anomalies.
“We are committed to the protection of men, women and children and we won’t accept any policy that discriminates against women, like the policy that prevents female police officers from getting married for a period of time, while their male counterparts can get married even while in police college. However, any law that is against the constitution is a nullity,” Arase noted.
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