Abstract
Community based policing is a mechanism devised to create a relationship between police and the immediate environment they find themselves, in order to tackle crime, disorder, safety issues and most importantly improve the lives of everyone in the community. With the incessant security threats and high crime rate in the eastern part of Nigeria, there is an urgent need to synergize the efforts of the community, the local government and the police to work together so as to checkmate crime. The rationale for involving the community is as a result of the overwhelming nature of crime and the inability of the government via the central police to checkmate crimes. The objective of this paper is to examine the inability of the police to efficiently carry out its constitutional roles and the need to decentralize the police force by having state police. The methodology adopted in this paper is the doctrinal method of legal research. The paper made use of primary sources of data collection such as enabling laws, statutes and acts and secondary sources of data such as conventions, journal articles, newspaper publications and internet materials. The result indicated that the power to regulate police which is one of the security apparatus of Nigeria rests solely on the federal government. It is recommended among other things that states be empowered constitutionally to establish state police that will adopt community policing mechanism as one of the ways of putting to an end the security challenges in the south east.