Nigerian has seen a rise in ethnic based killings, militancy, herdsmen-farmers clashes, kidnapping, ritual killing, and insurgency in the North-east to mention but a few. This worrying levels of insecurity has called for the adoption of a more community based approach to policing. This community based approach otherwise called “community policing” creates an avenue for collaboration between the community and the police. Scholars highlight that community policing has immensely impacted the crime levels of societies positively. However, questions continue to arise on the effectiveness of community policing in governance challenged societies such as Nigeria, particularly with the implications of insecurity to the education of adolescents who are exposed to rape, kidnapping and trafficking in the country. This paper therefore explored the use of community policing in tackling security challenges posed in the education of adolescent in secondary schools in Nigeria. It identified the insecurity problems in the country as well as the challenges faced by the Nigerian police in curbing these problems, while highlighting and analyzing the benefits of community policing on educational attainment and society in general. In addition, the paper investigated the challenges of community policing in Nigeria. For the purpose of this, a structured questionnaire titled “The Impact of Community Policing on Adolescent Educational Attainment in Kogi State” was used for data collation and the data obtained analyzed employing simple descriptive statistics. The research revealed that the main cause of insecurity in the country can be attributed to lack of education and poverty while corruption ridden was revealed as the disturbing perception of the Nigerian police force. Furthermore, the study established that the main consequence of insecurity in the attainment of education by adolescent is increased rate of school dropout as well sexual abuse and rape while in effective community policing influences school enrollment by adolescents and academic performance. The paper offered a number of recommendations which include that members of the community policing groups should cut across ethnicity, religious and political inclinations, sensitization campaigns should be carried out to educate and enlighten the public on the importance of education, tolerance should be advocated by the Government and non-governmental bodies, greater efforts should be put into researching and discovering ways in which the Nigerian police can build its image and trust to the Nigerian citizenry and awareness campaigns should be carried out to enlighten the public on the need to collaborate with the police to mention but a few.
Keywords: Community Policing, Insecurity, adolescent education
