Thread by @DoubleEph

Nope
Nyet
Nein

Infact maybe the hashtag should change to #EndSARS+ It has to end in addition to whatever else is demanded for 2 clear reasons

https://twitter.com/taiwoyedele/status/1315237845716537345

First of all, if you are a sadist and want to design a police unit that is unaccountable and operates with impunity, you will struggle to come up with anything worse than SARS.

First one - count the number of testimonies of people’s encounters with SARS and see how many times people say they were not even sure if it was Police or Armed Robbers. They wear ripped jeans and have NO name badges or numbers. But this isn’t even the worst part

SARS can operate in a state *without* the knowledge of the police in that state. That is why when someone is picked up by SARS, you can go to the police station and they’ll have no clue where the person is. I wrote this about a friend’s experience in 2018 guardian.ng/features/the-s…

A friend was telling me yday how he spent some time at Force HQ in one state. While he was there, calls started coming in that police were terrorising people somewhere. But the police at Force HQ had no clue. Their men were not in that location and no one authorised such a move

So to recap - SARS are a ‘federal’ unit who operate without identification and can go into any state to carry out ‘operations’ without informing the local police force in advance about what they’re doing

How on earth is armed robbery something that needs to be dealt with at a ‘federal’ level in this way anyway? And without working with the local police. Even if you put a saintly policeman inside SARS, he cannot come out smelling of roses

This is why #SARSMustEnd - you can’t really have a bunch of guys running around heavily armed and operating with impunity without ANY form of local accountability. It has to go and be replaced with something more along the lines of the RRS. At the very least