Police Brutality, Human Rights Violations and the 2020 #EndSARS Protests in Lagos, Nigeria

This study examines the factors responsible for the outbreak of the #EndSARS protest in Lagos, Nigeria. Relying on primary sources of data (questionnaires and Focus Group Discussions), correlation, regression and content analysis were employed to establish (i) the relationship between human rights violations and protest outbreak; (ii) the relationship between the repressive response of the government to protest and protest transformation from peaceful to violent one as well as manifestation of criminality. The results show that there exists a strong positive relationship between human rights violations and protest outbreaks and between the repressive response of the state's security agencies and protest transformation.