The Nigeria Police Trust Fund (NPTF) has begun a four-day training on public order and modern crowd management for at least 100 police personnel in Zamfara.

Speaking at the event in Gusau on Tuesday, Bashir Umar, an NPTF programme coordinator, said the training would imbue young police officers with public order policing techniques.

He said the fund was committed to ensuring Nigerian police officers attain the best global policing practices.

”The participants will also understand how to implement modern crowd control system without using excessive force,” he said.

Mr Umar said the training was part of the fund’s 2022 intervention aimed at improving the capacity of police personnel.

“We want to have a police system that adheres strictly to globally accepted rules of engagement in crowd control,” stated Mr Umar. “So this programme is part of our mandate to train and retrain police personnel for effective service delivery.”

He said the NPTF would continue to be proactive in delivering on its mandate to train personnel and equip the police service with modern security gadgets.

The programme coordinator urged the participants to take the training seriously and apply the knowledge gained during the exercise in their daily activities.

In his lecture, Aondowase Targba of the Department of Sociology, Federal University Gusau, called for recruiting more personnel into the police force.

Mr Targba, who delivered a lecture on public order and crowd management, said the police force was understaffed.

”The police system must be well-staffed and equipped with modern crime-fighting gadgets to perform optimally. The Nigeria Police, as it is today, does not meet the United Nations’ required standard of one policeman to 140 citizens,” Mr Targba explained. “Especially when you consider the nation’s population estimated at 200 million people.”

(NAN)