Attendance, a statement, an arrest or an investigation may show that a claimant accessed police action at one stage. They do not establish that the claimant can continue to access the further police action required as the protection process unfolds.
The Response Fallacy
The fallacy lies in treating access to one police response as evidence of access to the protection process as a whole. Yet, protection may depend on continued deployment, investigation, transport, enforcement, escalation or follow-up. Each of those steps requires resources, and access may become more difficult as the process moves from one stage to the next.
An assessment must therefore consider whether the claimant can continue to access the police action required and the terms on which that continuing access is obtained.
A Useful Protection Chain
For country analysis, my professional experience has taught me to think of police protection in terms of a chain rather than a binary yes/no question. The chain begins with a report and assessment of the threat. It moves through deployment, lawful intervention and control of the immediate situation. It then requires whatever reinforcement is necessary to contain or remove the immediate danger, followed by investigation and supervisory escalation where necessary, continuing protective action and accountability if the protective response fails.
Every link in that chain requires resources.
As Parts 1 and 2 of this series have already discussed, police protection is not delivered by legal authority alone. Officers have to travel. Vehicles need fuel.
Investigations require communications, transport, personnel and evidence-gathering.
Suspects may have to be located and transported. Witnesses may need to be interviewed. Court orders may require enforcement.
The significance of the chain is that accessibility can change from one step to the next. A claimant may successfully access the first police response but be unable to access what follows if the institution cannot resource the next step without assistance from the complainant. An institutional resource shortfall becomes an accessibility problem when the burden of supplying what is missing shifts to the complainant or her supporters.
The nature and persistence of the threat also affect how many stages of police action a complainant may need to access. A continuing threat may require repeated rather than one-off intervention. A complaint about opportunistic theft is not operationally identical to a threat from an intimate partner, a trafficking network, a cult group, an influential family, a wealthy employer, a community authority or an actor with police or political connections.
Access to one link in the protection chain does not establish access to the next. The assessment must therefore consider whether the complainant can obtain the subsequent police action required, what that access requires of her, and who supplies the resources needed to keep the process moving.
Initial Access May Not Be Durable Access
If maintaining the protection process requires repeated telephone calls, journeys to police stations or distant state commands, fuel, transport, professional assistance, escalation or mobilisation of other people, access itself becomes something the complainant must continually reproduce.
The issue is no longer simply whether the complainant can enter the system, but whether she can continue to obtain the police action required for as long as the protection process demands it.
This is also why repeated escalation requires scrutiny.
A complainant may initially receive an inadequate response and then be expected to approach a DPO, Area Command, Commissioner, Police Service Commission, National Human Rights Commission, courts, specialist agencies or NGOs. While those routes are real and important, their existence does not, by itself, establish that the protection process remains accessible.
Escalation itself has an access cost. It also requires telephone credit, transport, repeated attendance, time away from work, professional assistance, a lawyer or NGO, knowledge of the hierarchy, or somebody capable of reaching a senior officer.
Etc, etc, etc.
It is not enough that the claimant can obtain one protective intervention if access to the next necessary intervention depends upon resources she does not possess.
What Does The Pattern Show?
None of these facts, taken alone, establishes that State protection is inaccessible. Their significance lies in the pattern of dependence they may reveal. There is a material difference between incidental expenses incurred while using a functioning public service and a situation in which police action itself repeatedly depends upon resources the complainant or her supporters must provide.
That distinction matters for claimants without money, family support, professional assistance or influential contacts.
A Practitioner Account: Who Resourced The Protection Process?
A Nigerian family lawyer, writing publicly about a matter in which she had been professionally involved, provides a useful illustration of how, in practice, continuing access to police activity can depend upon resources supplied by the complainant or her supporters.
The example does not establish national prevalence. Its value is that it exposes the process and resources required to keep police action moving after the initial report.
A mother discovered that her husband had collected their two daughters from school without informing her. She could not establish where he or the children were. The father later confirmed that he had them but did not disclose their location.
The matter subsequently involved FIDA and the lawyer who described the case. Police enquiries continued for approximately three weeks before the children were located with relatives in another State.
Locating the children, however, did not end the process.
According to the lawyer's account, further progress required assistance from FIDA colleagues in that State, continuing engagement with the police, intervention with senior officers, communication between Abuja and the State where the children had been found, and arrangements for their return.
Most importantly for the present analysis, keeping the process moving required money.
This is not an isolated observation. Nigerian service providers and implementation assessments have reported for years that victims of gender-based violence and their families have to meet practical costs associated with obtaining assistance, including transport, police logistics, medical treatment and legal support. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy's assessment of VAPP implementation across 12 states documented precisely these kinds of costs. Service providers assisting victims of SGBV have reported the same problem in workshops convened with NAPTIP across the country since 2020 at least, as recorded in unpublished workshop documentation.
The lawyer records that the mother's father was willing and able to meet the necessary expenses. There were communications, travel arrangements and other practical costs. At one stage, flight tickets were being arranged for the mother, the children and an accompanying police officer because police accompaniment was anticipated for the journey back to Abuja.
Following further intervention, the children were released and returned to Abuja with their mother and an officer from the relevant State Gender Unit.
The police ultimately 'succeeded' in locating and returning the children but it was the process that resulted in the children being located and returned to their mother. For an accessibility analysis, the important information is what had to be supplied to keep police action moving from the initial report to that result.
The process reportedly required sustained investigation, professional advocacy, assistance from FIDA, inter-State coordination, access to senior police officers, repeated follow-up and, critically, a family member able to finance the practical costs of keeping the process moving.
That is why resources matter to an assessment of accessibility.
Police action consumes resources: communication, transport, personnel, investigation, coordination and, sometimes, travel across jurisdictions. Where those costs cannot be met institutionally and have to be supplied by the complainant or her supporters, financial circumstances can determine whether access to police action continues beyond the initial response.
The next installment turns to a separate question: where State protection is not practically accessible to the claimant, can she safely and reasonably avoid the risk by relocating elsewhere in Nigeria?