The Minister of Police Affairs, Mohammad Dingyadi, has inaugurated the Police Public Complaints Committee (PPCC) to handle complaints against police officers.

Inaugurating the committee on Wednesday in Abuja, Dingyadi said the committee was a specialised institution created to deal strictly with complaints against police personnel.

He said the focus was to put in place a permanent structure that would help to check civil unrest effectively.

The minister said the idea was to provide the populace with the opportunity to channel their grievances on policemen’s misconduct to the appropriate quarters for necessary actions.

He stated that PPCC had been in existence for years but had been moribund due to lack of funds.

According to him, if the PPCC has been active, it would have provided an adequate channel through which affected Nigerians would have been ventilating their grievances on police brutality.

He added that the tragedy that befell the country during the #EndSARS protests would have been averted if the PPCC was active.

Dingyadi said the federal government “is determined to ensure that such ugly incidents would never occur again.”

He added, “The (Police) Public Complaints Commission deals generally with all kinds of complaints against administrative injustices by public institutions.

“The PPCC is created as a specialised institution to deal strictly with complaints against police personnel.”

He noted that the committee’s composition with the Ministry of Police Affairs as chairman had the Police Service Commission, Ministry of Justice, the National Human Rights Commission, and the National Intelligence Agency as members.

Other committee members include the CLEEN Foundation, a non-governmental organisation, the Nigeria Police, Police Community Relations Committee, and the State Security Service with the Police Inspectorate Department to serve as secretariat.

According to him, the overriding objective of PPCC is to serve as an institution that has oversight on activities of police personnel viz-a-viz their interaction with the public.

He said the habit of the public lodging complaints against police personnel at police stations had not given the desired solutions to aggrieved Nigerians.

The minister urged the committee to be transparent to give Nigerians confidence that their complaints would be treated by a fair, just, and equitable system.

TodayNG