Nigeria Police Train Officers On Cybercrime

The Nigerian police yesterday trained its officers on major ways to investigate and tackle various issues of cyber related crimes.

The categories of officers trained included lawyers who are mostly prosecutors and investigators.

Speaking on the 3 – day train the trainers’ workshop in Abuja, organized by the Police in collaboration with Messrs MKN & Co. formerDeputy Inspector General of Police (DIG), Hashimu S. Argungu, said police in the country need modern technological Know-how to combat contemporary issues of cyber crimes.

He however expressed worry over lack of harmonized policies and laws for cyber security in the country.

“No specific regional (AU and ECOWAS) to address cyber crime. We are lagging behind in terms of measures for cyber security and inadequate legal measures to address electronic evidence. Also, lack of frameworks governing communications interception technology, electronic surveillance devices and legal framework among others”.

Argungu, added that the major challenges confronting Nigeria in the fight against cyber crime was an unending cyber battles of supremacy disagreement among law enforcement and security agencies.

“The country lacks integration between the public and private sector in fighting against cyber crime. Also, inadequacy in the policy option that deals with issues of surveillance are part of the challenges”.

The DIG, however said the police can be strengthened if the police’ powers would be expanded to integrate both Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) and all other Biometric Fingerprint System (BFS) as components to be called Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).

He said “the provision of the component system to store: DNA, Fingerprint, Voice mark and Face (iris of the eyes) in the component can help the police in fight against crime in the country.

On what the country should focus on, the expert said “Nigeria should adopt effective legal framework to combat cybercrime and other misuses of information technology. It should also ensure enforcement of laws in well-defined geographical boundaries and harmonize cyber laws and policies.

“There should be awareness/capacity building on policy and legal issues related to ICT. It should also set up Computer Incident Response Centres or Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT)”.

On his part, D.F Atidoga, called for intelligent monitoring, saying important buildings and business areas in Nigeria must turn to using new advances in intelligent monitoring from from biometrics and speech-recognition software to intelligent video and swap-card access to building.

He added that there must be need to reach members of the public who are constantly connected to the web and actively creating and sharing content in their own time.

“Security agencies should be turning to familiar social networking tools to share news and strategies for community security.”

On his part, the principal partner, MKN & Co, Barr. Muhammad Kudu Nakordi said the essence of the workshop was to train officers in line with ICT act which is enshrined in the administration of criminal justice act which is a new law that all police prosecutors must be legal officers.

He said police has the capacity to tackle cyber related offenses and members of the public should report such issue to police and not the EFCC.

He said the training keyed in to IGP Ibrahim Idris’ transformation agenda of training and retraining of officers to equip them with basic skills of fighting crimes in the country.