DIFFERENCES IN FORENSIC SCIENCE TRAINING AMONG THE INVESTIGATING POLICE OFFICERS IN NIGERIA

Training remains an important activity which organisations should embrace to ensure achievement of organizational goals. With modernization and development in science and technology, police organisations should train their personnel in the area of forensic investigation, because it is a fair and reliable means of understanding how crimes and related issues occurred. Sociodemographic factors play an important role in determining who goes for training among workers in an organisations; this could apply to the Nigeria Police (NP) agency. The aim of this study was to understand whether there were differences in the attendance of forensic science training among the Investigating Police Officers (IPOs) in the NP, based on their sociodemographic characteristics, namely, gender, age, marital status, highest educational qualification, rank and years spent in service. Using sample survey method, information related to the frequency of forensic science training attendance and sociodemographic profiles of 401 IPOs was collected. SPSS was used to analyze the data. Although forensic training was generally infrequent among the IPOs, the results showed that the frequency of training attendance was not similar among the categories of age, marital status, highest educational qualification and years spent in service, but was the same in the categories of gender and rank of the IPOs. It is recommended that sociodemographic profiles of IPOs need to be properly considered in selecting who should attend forensic training among the IPOs.  Article visualizations