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said they went all the way to police Force Headquarters in Abuja to following up on their
complaints about attacks on Fulani in January 2010, but the police did nothing. 520
Dysfunction and Corruption in the Police
The failure to conduct or follow through with criminal investigations is a systemic problem within
the police force. Human Rights Watch has documented how the police often will not open a
criminal investigation without financial inducements from the complainant and will rarely follow
through unless the complainant can meet the incessant demands to fund the cost of the
investigation. Meanwhile, accused persons with financial resources can sometimes pay off the
police to drop the case. Without financial resources or internal or external pressure on the police
to follow through on an investigation, the case will rarely go forward. 521
In communal violence cases, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of the victims are
poor—inter-communal violence rarely occurs in the affluent neighborhoods in these states—and
have often lost all their possessions in the violence. As a community leader from Kuru Karama,
whose wife was killed, explained when asked why he had not gone back to the police to follow up
on the complaint, “We are greatly handicapped—we lost everything [in the attack].” He added, “As
citizens of this country, even if we don’t go back to the police [to follow up on a complaint], they
[the police] should do something about it.” 522 In addition, external pressure from various
communities to protect the perpetrators and pursue political solutions instead works to further
discourage the police from going forward with these cases.
Criminal Prosecutions: The Rare Exceptions
The rare cases in which suspects have been charged before federal or state High Court, following
the completion of a criminal investigation by the police, have faced an uphill battle at trial. In
Plateau State, defense lawyers generally credited the federal prosecutors and judges for holding
speedy trials for the cases they brought related to the 2010 violence. By the end of 2010, the first
judgments were handed down, including several convictions. Since then, however, one of the High
Court judges has been deployed out of Plateau State, which has substantially delayed the
520 Human Rights Watch interview with Muhammed Nuru Abdullahi, Plateau State chairman of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders’
Association of Nigeria, Jos, February 2, 2012.
521 See Human Rights Watch, “Everyone’s in on the Game”: Corruption and Human Rights Abuses by the Nigeria Police Force, August
2010, pp. 13-17.
522 Human Rights Watch interview with a community leader from Kuru Karama, Jos, January 28, 2012.
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