Community policing and partnership: opportunities and challenges for gombe state nigeria
Mahmoud Umar, Usman Bappi · IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science · 2014
The role of the public in community policing cannot be over emphasized.Every definition of community policing shares the idea that the police and the community must work together to define and develop solutions to problems.One rationale for public involvement is the belief that police alone can neither create nor maintain safe communities.The public (i.e.local/traditional hunters, the vigilante group etc.) must assist in one way or the other to maintain law and order in the society.This led to the creation of local marshal by the state government in Gombe State through the Youth Rehabilitation and Empowerment Programme (YREP) which recruits almost 1,200 youth as marshals to assist in security, traffic and environmental management.This paper aimed at describing the benefit of community policing in Gombe state in particular and Nigeria in general, while making suggestions of how policing can be developed in communities today.The methodology adopted was the use of secondary data with the aid of content analysis approach.The study recommends amongst others, incorporating the activities of local vigilante groups to work side by side with the police units and other security outfits in the state in order to create synergy in the fight against crime. I.