Securitizing Public Vigilance: A Pragmatic and Critical Discourse Analysis of the Nigeria Police Force’s Press Release on Internal Security and Violent Crimes

Official police communication is an important site for defining threats, legitimating security action, and positioning citizens within security governance. This study examines a Nigeria Police Force (NPF) press release dated 16 February 2025 and published online on 17 February 2025, which reports operations against kidnapping and terrorism and calls for public vigilance. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive design and document analysis. The broader source universe consisted of NPF security-related press releases published in 2025, from which the focal release was purposively sampled because it combines operational success claims, militarized crime language, and explicit appeals for citizen participation. The selected document was segmented into 17 analytically meaningful utterances; these 17 utterances constituted the analytic population and all were examined. Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis model and securitization theory (Balzacq, 2005; Buzan et al., 1998) provide the two formal frameworks. Pragmatic speech-act functions are used only as a supporting descriptive lens. The analysis shows that militarized lexical choices such as “neutralized,” “fierce gun duel,” “tactical operation,” and “dislodgement” construct police action as necessary and effective. Numerical details and recovered items provide evidential support for institutional competence, while actor representation places the police as protectors, criminal suspects as threats, and citizens as cooperative security partners. The study concludes that the press release does more than report events: it legitimates intensified policing and securitizes public vigilance as a civic responsibility within Nigeria’s internal security discourse.