-As Community Policing Forum in Vahun, Lofa
As part of efforts to maintain peace and security in the absence of UNMIL, the joint security in Lofa has ended a terrain management and community policing forum with stakeholders in Vahun district, Lofa County.
The two-day forum, which was held from July 16 to the 17, brought together a power delegation comprising of officials and officers of the Liberia National Police, the Armed Forces of Liberia, the Liberia Immigration Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the National Security Agency NSA, the Liberia National Fire Service and the county superintendent as head of the county security council among others.
According to the chairman of the joint security in Lofa County, Chief Superintendent J. William Johnson of the Liberia National Police (LNP), the involvement of community members in securing their communities and understanding the terrine is one best way as a country.
“Security is every body’s business and as such the involvement of communities cannot be over emphasized”.
The two day forum allowed state securities to have interaction with citizens of Vahun district where issues of security concerns were discussed.
Some major issues discussed during the two days includes the illegal possession of single barrow guns by individuals who normally commits crimes with these guns, illegal mining activities and police misconduct among others.
The imitative was being sponsored by the Kaizen Company, a group that is implementing the second phase of the Mitigating Local Disputes in Liberia (MLDL) project, funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).
Kaizen is working to build the institutional and human capacity of local government officials and citizens to manage disputes and security concerns by focusing on developing and expanding County Security Councils (CSCs), District Security Councils (DSCs) and Community Forums (CFs).
Kaizen is supporting structures at multiple levels in Liberian society to give citizens the ability to bring disputes to authority figures as easily as possible with the aim of preventing minor disputes from becoming large scale conflicts. In this way, the project is working to foster peace by applying alternative dispute resolution and mediation techniques to supplant violence.
This builds citizens’ trust and confidence in the government’s ability to fairly and rapidly respond to issues that are (or could become) larger security concerns.
Since Kaizen took over MLDL at the end of 2014, structure members trained under the program have addressed over 1,300 disputes, resolving 940 of them.
Additionally, MLDL is providing direct support by procuring critical inputs such as solar panels, construction materials, computers, cameras, motorbikes, and office supplies to ensure that the councils and forums have the tools they need to conduct their work.
The project currently supports 32 structures in Lofa, Nimba, Bong, and Grand Gedeh counties providing mediation and adjudication support at all levels of Liberian society across the region where the country’s bloody civil wars first erupted.