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This article critically and empirically examines the everyday problem of corrupt policing and related abuses in urban Nigeria, with attention to the threat posed to ordinary Nigerians' basic human rights. The analysis, sociohistorically anchored, foregrounds colonial and military policies that have entrenched a culture of predation in the Nigeria Police Force. The article contributes to existing scholarship by directly relating corrupt and abusive policing to complex sociohistorical conditions, rather than seeing it as a purely managerial problem, whose solution lies in simplistic demands for internal reform. The article attempts to fill a gap in empirical scholarship by approaching corrupt and abusive policing from the angle of everyday practice, rather than by taking normative structural approaches and basing suppositions of actual behavior upon these. The article draws on evidence from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork research in Lagos State, southwestern Nigeria. The fieldwork evidence is supported by analyses of public discourse, a review of extant literature, some semiformal interviews, a review of national constitutions and international human rights law, and historical research. These together suggest conclusions pertinent to democratic reform of the Nigerian police.
Introduction
The corruption and abuse of policing is a serious problem facing many people living in Africa today, especially the poor and marginalized who fall within the lowest quintile of income (Agbiboa 2013a; Oluwaniyi 2011). A study of twenty-three developing countries by the World Bank found that ordinary citizens perceived the police as a source not "of help and security," but "of harm, risk, and impoverishment" (Power 2009:52). In Nigeria, the legacy and public image of the police has been that of "arbitrariness, ruthlessness, brutality, vandalism, incivility, low accountability to the public, and corruption" (Alemika 1988:161). As captured in surveys and popular culture, public representations of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) are strongly negative (Owen 2014:7), and "no government agency in the country is criticised more than the Nigeria Police Force" (Mwalimu 1990:53-54). In particular, the culture of predation that speckles the NPF today has not only eroded public support for this law enforcement agency, but has severely undermined the legitimacy of the federal government (Hills 2008:215-34). Despite its imperfections, however, ordinary people do report crime to the police more than any other nonfamily agency, as demonstrated in a 2009 national...