By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D
A camera should not frighten an honest police officer. A police uniform should not frighten a law-abiding citizen holding a camera. Somewhere between those two propositions lies the answer to the controversy surrounding Nigerians recording police officers while they perform their duties.
Inspector General of Police Olatunji Disu recently voiced his concern about citizens recording officers, especially when they make such recordings for social media content and skits. He described the trend as demoralising to personnel.
No one should simply mock his concerns.
Police officers are human beings. Wearing a uniform does not extinguish their right to dignity or privacy. An officer eating, resting, or going about private life should not automatically become material for somebody’s social media entertainment.
Nor should citizens interfere with arrests, compromise sensitive operations or endanger officers merely because they are holding mobile phones.
But there is an important distinction between turning police officers into unwilling actors in social media comedy and recording them while they exercise coercive powers of the state in public.
The Federal High Court in Warri drew that distinction sharply in March when it affirmed the constitutional right of Nigerians to record police officers conducting stop and search operations in public.
That judgment matters. Because policing involves extraordinary powers. A police officer can stop you. Question you. Search you in circumstances permitted by law. Arrest you. Detain you. And, in extreme circumstances authorised by law, use force.
Power of that magnitude requires corresponding accountability. This is why we should not automatically treat the camera as an enemy of policing. Indeed, there is a simple solution that could transform this debate.
Put cameras on the police too.
Authorities should provide every frontline officer, whose duties regularly involve citizen interaction, with a body-worn camera as Nigeria’s resources permit.
Then accountability would no longer depend entirely on whether a frightened motorist, passenger or passerby reached for a telephone when an encounter became contentious.
A properly regulated body camera can protect citizens from an abusive officer. But it can equally protect an honest officer from a dishonest accusation.
When a citizen alleges extortion, the recording can help establish what happened. If an individual makes a false assault claim against an officer, the footage can help clear his name. If there is disagreement over whether a suspect resisted arrest, evidence exists. The camera need not belong to either side of the argument. It should belong to the truth.
Interestingly, this idea is not alien to Nigeria. There is already a Body-Worn Camera by Law Enforcement Officers Bill before the National Assembly seeking to regulate their use. Among other safeguards, the proposed legislation prevents anyone from editing or deleting recordings before secure transfer and archiving.
Lagos has previously experimented with body cameras for law enforcement personnel. And only months ago, Lagos Commissioner of Police Fatai Tijani made perhaps the most sensible contribution to this debate when he told his officers that those performing their lawful duties should have nothing to fear from citizens recording them.
Citizens may record the police, and the police may record citizens. That should be the direction of modern policing. But body cameras are not magic.
Nigeria could purchase thousands tomorrow and still defeat its purpose through poor regulation. There must be clear rules about when recording begins and when an officer may switch a camera off. Authorities must securely store the footage. Officers must not be able to delete inconvenient recordings.
There must be procedures governing how citizens, lawyers, investigators, and courts obtain relevant footage. Victims of sexual offences, children, and people encountered in particularly vulnerable circumstances require privacy protection.
Consequences should follow when someone deliberately disables a camera during an encounter that needed to be recorded. Otherwise, we may merely add expensive cameras to an accountability system that remains ineffective.
Citizens also have responsibilities. The right to record is not a licence to obstruct. A person filming an arrest should maintain sufficient distance to allow officers to perform their duties. A citizen should not invade an officer’s legitimate private space merely to generate social media engagement. Nor should someone present a selectively edited recording dishonestly to create outrage.
Rights survive best when exercised responsibly. The Nigerian Bar Association has sensibly recognised this balance. Its position supports the right to record officers performing public duties while acknowledging legitimate concerns about privacy and unnecessary intrusion when officers are not acting officially.
But the deeper issue is trust. Why have Nigerians developed the instinct to reach for their phones during encounters with the police? Our history of allegations of extortion, unlawful searches, brutality, and abuse of authority plays a crucial role in explaining the answer. The EndSARS protests did not emerge from nowhere.
Still, we must not assume that every police officer acts corruptly or brutally solely based on his uniform. Nigeria has thousands of officers performing difficult and dangerous duties honourably, often under challenging conditions. Body cameras can serve them too.
The objective should therefore not be to create a surveillance contest between citizens and the police. It should be to create an evidential culture in which neither side has to rely entirely on an accusation against denial.
Police reform is ultimately about legitimacy. Citizens are more likely to cooperate with officers they trust. When officers know that objective evidence can test false allegations, they perform more confidently. And society gains when people can reconstruct disputed encounters using something more reliable than competing stories.
So, rather than asking Nigerians to put their phones away, perhaps the larger conversation should be about putting more cameras on the officers themselves. The citizen may have a camera. The police officer should have one too. There must, of course, be boundaries on both sides.
But where an officer is lawfully exercising public power in a public place, accountability should not fear visibility. Which leaves one simple question. Who is afraid of the camera?
*Lemmy Ughegbe, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645
