Force Public Relations Officer Mr. Frank Mba, in a telephone interview explained to Assistant Editor, Joke Kujenya, challenges of finding missing persons
WHat new measures are being deployed by the Police to find missing persons?
Worldwide, the method of looking for missing persons varies from community-to-community, state-to-state, and country-to-country. However, they all have a common denominator: factors such as socio-economic, culture and ways of life, among others.
As for the Nigerian Police, we have always done out, bit using standard methods in our search for missing persons depending on the person being looked for. If the person is for instance a journalist, we have to determine the personality, history, is he or she a truthful person when it comes to matter of integrity? We have to be able to ascertain the health condition of the person and so on. It is this and many other factors that will help us to initiate the methodology with which to commence our preliminary investigation and subsequent search. So, methodology differs in each case.
In most cases, when people go missing, police often find them and indeed, many people have been found. In the cases where they are not found, it could be that such a people may have died, perhaps, in road accidents, some may have slumped along the way, and may not have had any form of identity to be traced. In other cases, we have had situations where people found cannot be traced because their finger prints never matched any of those we have in our database. That means their cases are never even brought or reported to the police. In this wise, there would be little or no way we can be of help since we were never aware of the incidents in the first place.
Police Control Room often has lists of people reported but found. And once they are found, we have been able to reconnect them with their families. A very remarkable case was that of a two-year old we recently reconnected with her family. The little girl was found in Maiduguri after she was ‘stolen’ from her parents in Onitsha. One, we had the challenge of getting her family because she was too little to be able to tell her family. And after dedicated attempts, we were able to overcome the difficulty and eventually traced her parents and handed her over.
So also, it is usually hard for us to connect people with either memory loss or mental challenge. Such people are never able to tell us the needed information.
Is there a reliable database for the Police?
Of course, just as patients go to the hospitals when they have issues; so families of missing persons go to police offices to report cases of the incidents after 24hours of occurrence. To ascertain these cases, we check where the cases are reported to have happened, do background checks on the person missing and many others. Every police command has a database just as it is done with stolen cars and when found, we can refer you to go check at Oduduwa Police headquarters.
How then would you rate your success in these cases?
I can tell you boldly that we have recorded 90 percent in the number of persons being found. That is the fact except in the cases of deaths, accidents, or those taken to mortuaries without recourse to the police and later being traced. Then, there are the cases of those who fall into the hands of ritualists and so on. Areas of challenges I am reiterating is in the cases of death and where these people cannot be traced at all. And when a person leaves his or her home and tells a lie about his or her destination, now, that is another big problem. You know, the police and the family will concentrate their searches on the destination and the available information the person had given, whereas, the person may have encountered problems in another area entirely. This has happened more with younger people, especially females, who have either gone with a boyfriend or a sugar-daddy but lied to their families that they had gone to see an aunt or an uncle. Then both the families and police will be dissipating their energies in the wrong direction. There have even been cases where such aunties or uncles have been arrested wrongly but after so much torture, the truth emerges and then, they would be released. We have handled cases of people going to picnics but told a different story at home. Then, their bodies were later found in mortuaries while families who knew nothing about the cases have been wrongly punished. Some people had collapsed due to internal health problems and when the situation leads to their death, they have no trace or identification and then, their families keep hoping endlessly. Many corpses found on roadsides belong to some families, but without ID cards or someone coming to identify them, they are not linked to nobody. And this is why we have been shouting to Nigerians to carry their ID cards or other viable means of identification about. They must make it easy for themselves to be connected to their families. Everybody belongs to some families anyway.
What happens in the instances of accidents?
Already, you know that operators of transport services make efficient use of manifests in the cases of interstate travels. And each of these manifests is duly documented at the bus terminals so they are not lost or burnt in case they encounter an accident. The idea of Passengers’ Manifest in our inter-state vehicles is for all passengers to write their names, telephone numbers, next-of-kin and destinations so that in the case of any eventuality, issue of identification will not be a problem. But even at that, many of the passengers will write fake names and information. And we also advise that people should have valid identity cards on them.
Also, Nigerians should try as much as possible to be their brother’s keepers. When you see someone feeling sick or trying hard to gain his or her composure, it is not right to run away or leave such a person to slump. We must help one another. Some of these are minor preventive measures. Our young girls, students, should be more security conscious. Why would you hitch a ride from a total stranger on roads such as Lagos-Ibadan expressway or Ore-Benin road? That is extremely dangerous. Why travel if you don’t have the fund? Commercial Sex Workers (CSWs) have fallen prey to ritualists in brothels across the country because they operate under false names. They have been arrested when they have problems and because we don’t have their real identities, no one could trace them or tell their actual identities. These are serious factors that people often trivialise. How would a Fatima for instance call herself Sandra because she’s a CSW? So, if such a person has a problem, her identity would be hard to match with what her family is looking for and then, her search may be endless. If the CSWs must continue in their choice trade, let them have someone they will confide their real identities to so that if something happens, the police will be able to find them and notify their real families.
So, what do you advise people do?
It is simple. Nigerians should always tell the truth about their whereabouts. Family members should strive as much as possible to be sincere with one another. No matter how hard things are in every family, each of them must have someone they can confide in. If they must be deceptive, the most terrible thing to play with is their destination at any point in time. A family member must be able to tell the police the actual information needed to trace their missing person. But in the instance where this is missing, the police will try their possible best; but finding the person could take longer than necessary. By-and-large however, Nigerian Police has been up to task in finding and re-connecting missing persons with their families.
