With the 2019 elections fast approaching, Oyo state Commissioner of Police, Mr. Adekunle Odude has stated that he is optimistic of a peaceful general election.

He stated this in an exclusive interview with CEOAfrica on Thursday in Ibadan. The state Commissioner of Police noted that the command is doing all within its power to ensure a hitch-free election.

He said, “The general elections are close by but it is still early to talk about that,. We are expecting to get backup in terms of manpower and equipment from the headquarters and I think that it will ease our work. We are doing intelligence based policing and some of the people that we are identifying, that could be problematic during the elections are already been picked up. So election duty doesn’t have to be when election is on. A lot of work is been done in the background before that time and by the grace of God we will have a peaceful election. This I am very confident about .”

On the peaceful and hitch-free, conduct of the bye election and partiy primaries in the state, the CP said, “Party primaries and general elections are two different ball games. Party primaries are primaries within each of the parties and usually there is not much acrimony among them. What we did during the last primary is that we used every single police man that was available. We were all on ground. Particularly,  I was on ground till the following morning when some of them finished their primaries. Same applied to the Deputy Commissioners, Assistant Commissioners, every available personnel, dogs, horses etc, were put to use to ensure there is no crisis.”

Speaking on the relative peace in recent times, the chief law enforcement of the state, Mr. Odude credited that to the help of God and also careful execution of laid down instructions.

He said, “There is no big secret about it, what we do is that we get instructions from the Inspector General of Police on what we should do. He gives us specific instructions on visibility policing, community policing and other area of policing where he lays emphasis on. We meet him from time to time for specific instructions on what to do at each time and we come back to implement what he has instructed.

“We put our men on the road, we carry out raids as much as we can, we also engage intelligence based policing like I said earlier and all that is known to us in policing and we thank God for the sucess so far, crime rate is decreasing and we hope to maintain the trend.”