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Should a police officer be filmed while he works? Yes, says the new President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya. But she is also asking Nigerians to know where to draw the line.
Badejo-Okusanya made her position known on Tuesday in Abuja, during a sit-down with Inspector-General of Police Olatunji Disu and senior NBA officials at the Force Headquarters. The meeting, Premium Times reports, was arranged to ease long-running tension between lawyers and police officers across the country.
Her point was simple: officers acting within the law have nothing to hide, so there is no reason to fear a camera. It is a bold stance for someone who only stepped into office last month, becoming the first woman ever elected to lead the NBA.
To understand why this matters so much right now, it helps to go back to a court judgment delivered on 17 March. The Federal High Court in Warri, Delta State, ruled that filming police officers while they work in public is a constitutional right, not a crime. Justice Hyeladzira Nganjiwa gave the verdict after lawyer Maxwell Nosakhare Uwaifo sued the police over a rough stop-and-search encounter in May 2025. The court also ordered officers to wear their names and force numbers visibly whenever they're out on public duty, according to Premium Times.
This was not entirely new ground for the police. Back in December 2023, the force itself had already admitted that photographing or filming an officer on duty was not against the law. And when the Warri judgment landed, the police's own Complaint Response Unit welcomed it, saying it would push policing standards higher. Yet the goodwill was soon tested. In May, a video went viral showing an officer allegedly threatening bystanders who tried to record him, and the police eventually confirmed that disciplinary action was taken against him.
It is against this backdrop that IGP Disu raised his concerns on Tuesday. He told the NBA delegation that the court ruling had left many of his officers on edge, Premium Times reports, because members of the public now film them in situations that have nothing to do with police work, even while they are simply eating in a restaurant. "Everywhere you see a policeman, start recording a policeman," he said, describing the trend as demoralising for his men. He was careful to add that he was not disputing the public's right to film officers actually carrying out duties. His concern, he explained, was people turning ordinary policemen into unwilling stars of social media skits, often ignoring the long hours many of them put in at checkpoints, on highways, and in remote forest posts, sometimes from sunrise to nightfall.
The NBA president did not dismiss these concerns. She agreed that filming an officer relaxing over a meal, far from any police duty, crosses into an invasion of privacy that nobody should have to tolerate. Still, she insisted that duty and downtime are two very different things. When an officer is actively working, she argued, the camera becomes a tool for accountability rather than harassment, pointing to how the United States adopted police body cameras for exactly that reason, according to Premium Times. Recordings, she explained, can settle disputes over what really happened between an officer and a member of the public, and can even protect officers themselves from false accusations.
Her advice to Nigeria was not to shut the practice down, but to define it properly. She called on lawmakers to sharpen existing laws so that everyone, police and public alike, knows exactly when filming is fair game and when it isn't.
Beyond the filming debate, the Abuja meeting opened up a wider conversation about how lawyers and police officers deal with each other. IGP Disu conceded that friction between the two professions is bound to happen from time to time, but said it should always be handled with courtesy and professionalism rather than confrontation. He listed a few priorities going forward: better working relationships between officers and lawyers, faster movement on criminal trials that tend to drag in court, and a direct communication line between the police force and the NBA.
The NBA also brought its own proposal to the table. Backed by UNICEF, the association wants a lawyer stationed at every police station specifically to assist children who find themselves caught up in the justice system, a safeguard meant to protect some of the most vulnerable people who ever walk into a police station.