The Nigeria Police Force

The earliest direct ancestor of the modern Force was the Hausa Constabulary, raised in Lagos Colony in 1861 by Governor Henry Stanhope Freeman with a nucleus of 30 freed Hausa slaves recruited from Sierra Leone and the Lagos hinterland — chosen precisely because they were ethnically distinct from the local Yoruba population they would be deployed against. The unit was reorganised and expanded in 1879 by Governor John Hawley Glover into the Lagos Constabulary, a ~1,200-man armed police body under the Colonial Governor of Lagos, and was known to the Lagos public as the "Glover Hausas."

Parallel forces grew up across the territories that would become Nigeria: the Royal Niger Company Constabulary(1886, Lokoja, under George Goldie); the Oil Rivers Irregulars / Niger Coast Constabulary (1891–94, Calabar, under Consul Sir Claude Macdonald); the Northern Nigeria Regiment & Police (1900, Kaduna, under Lugard); and the Southern Nigeria Police (1906, Lagos, after the merger of Lagos Colony with the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria).

Each was a hybrid gendarmerie — armed with Snider–Enfield then Martini-Henry rifles, organised on military lines with barrack life and uniforms patterned on the West India Regiment, and used as much for the collection of caravan tolls, the burning of "recalcitrant" villages, the enforcement of court fines, the suppression of slave-raiding (and, just as often, the suppression of resistance to colonial taxation) as for ordinary criminal policing. The punitive expedition — a column of constabulary troops sent to a village that had refused tax, killed a District Officer, or harboured an accused person — was the constabulary's signature instrument. The 1897 Sack of Benin, the 1901–02 Aro Expedition, the 1903 Kano–Sokoto campaignand the 1906 Satiru massacre were all constabulary-led operations.

The institutional DNA of the modern Force — barracks separated from the policed population, "Mobile" units that move in armed columns, the centrality of the checkpoint to revenue, and the principle that the police answer to executive power rather than to the public — all trace to the constabulary period. The opening entries of the Nigeria Police Brutality Register — Aba 1929, Iva Valley 1949, Enugu and Burutu in the 1940s — are constabulary-era massacres committed before the Force was even called "the Nigeria Police Force."

Lord Lugard's amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria on 1 January 1914 created a single colony but two separate police forces — the Northern Nigeria Police Force (HQ Kaduna) and the Southern Nigeria Police Force (HQ Lagos). They operated in parallel for the next sixteen years, with different uniforms, command structures and training schools.

By Order-in-Council of the Governor-General, the two regional forces were merged on 1 April 1930 into a single Nigeria Police Force, with a unified rank structure, a single Inspector-General reporting to the Governor-General, and a Force Headquarters at Obalende, Lagos. The office of Inspector-General was held by seconded British colonial police officers from 1930 to 1964.

At independence the Force numbered ~12,000 officers. Section 105 of the 1960 Constitution preserved the NPF as a single national force; the Police Force College at Jos (founded 1953) began producing the first generation of Nigerian Assistant Superintendents. The Native Authority Police Forces of the Northern, Western and Eastern Regions — separate from the NPF — continued to exist alongside it.

On 1 January 1964 Louis Orok Edet succeeded Mr B.J.M. Brown as Inspector-General — the first Nigerian to hold the office. The Force HQ in Abuja is named in his honour.

Following the first military coup, the Ironsi and Gowon administrations dissolved the Native Authority Police Forces in the Northern, Western and Eastern Regions and absorbed their personnel into the NPF, which became the only police force in the country — a centralisation that the 1979 and 1999 constitutions later locked in.

The 1979 Constitution created the Police Service Commission as a constitutional body responsible for appointments, promotions, postings and discipline of all police officers below the rank of IGP. The PSC has since been a permanent site of conflict with the Force HQ over who controls the Force.

Formed in Lagos in 1984 by ACP Simeon Danladi Midenda as a covert, plain-clothes anti-armed-robbery unit, SARS spread to every State Command in the 1990s and 2000s. By the mid-2010s its operations had drawn sustained allegations of extortion, torture and extrajudicial killings — documented by Amnesty International, the National Human Rights Commission and the 2018–19 Presidential Panel chaired by Justice S.M.A. Belgore.

On 16 September 2020 President Buhari signed the new Nigeria Police Act, repealing the colonial-era Police Act 1943. Four weeks later, on 8 October 2020, the #EndSARS protests began. The IGP disbanded SARS on 11 October; on 20 October soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos. The Lagos Judicial Panel of Inquiry (Justice Doris Okuwobi, chair) reported in November 2021 that the events at Lekki amounted to a massacre.

The Police Act (Amendment) Act 2024 fixed the IGP's tenure at four years from date of appointment, regardless of statutory retirement age — a response to a sequence of post-2007 IGPs who served truncated tenures and one (Usman Baba) whose retention beyond retirement age was litigated all the way to the Federal High Court.