Police Brutality in Nigeria Spark Protests and Ignites a Movement

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Global Dispatches -- Conversations on Foreign Policy and World Affairs

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In early October a video began to circulate on social media in Nigeria depicting a gruesome act of police brutality. The perpetrators of the police violence were from a notorious police unit called the Special Robbery Squad, or SARS. As this video went viral, Nigerians voiced their own stories of being victimized by this police unit. The hashtag #ENDSARS was born. But the story does not end there.  Olorunrinu Oduala, helped to transform this hashtag into a massive youth-led protest movement against police brutality in Nigeria. What started as a hashtag has become a concrete set of demands for police reform and accountability, around which millions of young people in Nigeria have mobilized.