Lagos - Ambode tasks police on crime prevention

•Lagos State Governor Akinwumi Ambode

Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, on Saturday urged the state police command to step up its surveillance and come up with new strategies to tackle criminal activities in the state.

The governor, according to a statement issued by his Chief Press Secretary, Habib Aruna, spoke at the closing session of the four-day Leadership Retreat for the State Executive Council, Body of Permanent Secretaries and some heads of Parastatals, where he urged the police to improve on the mode of operations to ensure safety of lives and property in the state.

Ambode, who spoke shortly after the state’s Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, addressed participants at the retreat, also pledged the support of the state government towards effective policing of the state.

He, however, said the resources ploughed into securing the state must reflect in the reduction of criminal activities.

“We’re not yet where we want to be. We have only just 33, 000 policemen in Lagos for a population of over 20million. Again, we don’t have control over these police officers.

“We need to let the commissioner of police leave this retreat believing that the police need to own their own business just the way we have told ourselves that we want to own the business of governance. We need to see some things change, there has to be some form of paradigm shift, we want to see our police officers patrol in convoy between 12:00 midnight and 4:00am.

“There should be presence; we want to show presence, security agencies must also show presence. We need to enforce, we want to see patrol vehicle moving, we don’t want to see stationery policemen, they don’t have to stay in the vehicle. We want to see something different from what it used to be in the past.

“It’s still the same style, but people must see improvement on it. That’s why we on our own part, we have gone out of our budget limits, using our resources from the Security Trust Fund, to say that, yes, it might not be within our budget, but we would spend money to support the police. This is because if the state is safe, the economy will thrive,” Ambode said.

He also charged his team to take the lessons learnt from the retreat and make a commitment to implement them in their various ministries, departments and agencies in order to better the lot of the people of the state.