It Is Time to Go Public: Public Sociology and Community Policing in Nigeria

Introduction

Sociologists are for example interested in what happens between individuals and groups in the society and have found that social interactions among human beings bring about some fundamental social changes, the outcome which can be defined as either ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’. However, changes in modern society that are rapid and complex, and which give rise to social problems such as crime, poverty, corruption, cultism, drug and child abuse and industrial unrest. As a strategy to curb forms of crime, the relevance of community policing derived from the need to facilitate robust relationships and mutual information flow between the police and the public. There was a £30million UK Department for International Development (UK-DFID) overseen community policing initiative run in conjunction with the British Council's Security Justice and Growth in Nigeria. However, the desired community safety not achieved on account of the wide communication gaps between the security providers and the public in Nigeria. This gap has underlining causal relationships with negative influence of family norms, community networks, and perceptions of corruption by police and public. Hence, whilst there is need for a drastic socio-cultural re-orientation in favour of community policing best practices in Nigeria, it cannot be achieved without research-based initiative-taking public engagements (Audu, 2016; Audu,2018). In 2004 at the Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy (2005) who believes that we can solve such problems introduced the concept of public sociology involving taking sociology to the public audience. Adopting the Michael Burawoy's (2005) public sociology theoretical perspective, this paper explores the need and possibility of taking ideas of community policing to the public domain in Nigeria.