Amidst all the chaos that broke out in Lagos on Saturday, a rather disturbing video grabbed significant attention.

At least a dozen young men, all shirtless and sweaty, were filmed jam-packed inside a bus in apparent discomfort.Sports

"What put you into this mess?" a man behind the camera, presumably a police officer, asked one of the distressed men, Debo Adebayo, a comedian more popularly known as Mr Macaroni.

"What mess?" another man, also presumably a police officer replied, "They know what they're doing."

The video immediately spread widely across social media in Nigeria, presumably first shared by one of the police officers in an attempt to publicly humiliate the men in their custody.

Anyone watching the video completely ignorant of the context surrounding it would be forgiven for presuming the young men had blown up a government building or committed mass murder, but they hadn't.

They were a handful of Nigerians picked up by a mob of police officers to prevent them to peacefully gathering for a demonstration at the Lekki Toll Gate.

The demonstration was announced a week ago, and the Police and the Federal Government had cautioned against it.

Arresting those men was punishment for disregarding the unconstitutional order, and deliberately sharing that video of their inhumane treatment was, for a lot of people, a shockingly new low, even for the Nigeria Police Force.

When the momentum of the historic #EndSARS protest last October came to a tragic halt with the shooting of peaceful protesters at the toll gate, authorities blamed protesters for continuing with the demonstrations even though their demands had been met.

An overarching theme of those demands was (and remains) a thorough reform of the operations of a Police Force that has become as much of a menace as the evil it's sworn to protect Nigerians from.

Before and after the October demonstrations, the Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, has championed the illusion of a functioning citizen-centred policing approach that upholds the rule of law.

Federal Government officials have also pointed to the setting up of judicial panels of inquiry as evidence of its commitment to conquering a cancerous policing system.

But actions matter more than words, and what Nigerians have been seeing is not matching up with what authorities are telling them is happening.

And that video of those young sweaty men in distress is further proof of what is real about the Nigeria Police Force, and what is fiction.

Section 40 of the 1999 Constitution is unambiguous in its allocation of the right to peaceful assembly for all Nigerian citizens.

But for as long as anyone remembers, government officials have been dancing around that provision like it's negotiable and subjected to the whims of those sworn to uphold the constitution.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, earlier this week said the government would not allow the demonstration take place because it had intel that subversive elements were going to hijack it to cause the same level of destruction that led to the death of dozens of civilians and police officers last October.

This is a familiar refrain of the government and the police establishment every time Nigerians decide to protest - there's always some phantom intel that some phantom elements plan to hijack the peaceful nature of the protest.

The Nigerian establishment would simply rather prefer that Nigerians don't exercise their rights to protest peacefully, and just lay down and take everything they get.

Compared to, say, 15 years ago, Nigerian policing has marginally improved, coincidentally with the prominence of social media and phone technology that enhances accountability, but the needle of improvement has not moved well enough to ease the worries of the Nigerian public.

A major reason for the terribly slow improvement is the failure of the Police establishment to simply admit that the entire tree is rotten.

Authorities will never agree with the issue past the limit of "only a few bad eggs", but the problem with the Nigeria Police Force is significantly worse than just a few officers going rogue.

Before the unfortunate shooting of protesters at the toll gate on October 20, around a dozen protesters had been killed by officers in extra-judicial shootings at demonstrations across the country.

Dozens more were mindlessly brutalised and put in the hospital simply for demanding that people protecting them need to stop killing them too.

Yet, the IGP has repeated since then that officers were on their best behaviour and well-restrained in their 'impressive' handling of the protests before the post-October 20 wave of violence.

That dishonesty about what is real and what is seen by everyone else but the people that matter is what needs to be addressed.

During the October demonstrations, a journalist, Pelumi Onifade, was killed in the custody of the Lagos State Task Force; a driver, Ikechukwu Iloamauzor, was killed by officers chasing protesters in Lagos; and another bystander, Jimoh Isiaq, was killed by the bullet of an officer cracking down on protesters in Oyo, yet no one has been brought to book for those atrocities four months later.

But the IGP tells the nation that the Force has been reformed and that everyone should go home.

Policing is no easy work. A functioning society expects that its police officers will act as its shield against all the great evils that humans are capable of. That's no easy work for anybody, and the intricacies of the job can tend to have deadly consequences for officers.

But the Nigeria Police Force has for years posed the same level of danger to its society as it is sworn to protect it from.

When the institution sworn to protect constitutional rights of citizens brazenly tries to take away those rights by fiat, and does it without acknowledgement or consequences, then actual criminals become less of a concern.

The Nigerian policing system is a terrible mess, and the people largely responsible for fixing it first have to admit the problem, and faithfully implement reforms that actually work and can be felt by everyone.

Among other things, these reforms must truly ensure that officers don't get away with the violation of the right to life and dignity of every Nigerian, and that they don't feel protected from consequences so much that they film and publicise these violations.

Nigerians have simply lost patience with the barbaric culture of policing in the country, and the Nigeria Police Force must get on board with that, preferably sooner rather than later.

*Pulse Editor's Opinion is the viewpoint of an Editor at Pulse. It does not represent the opinion of the Organisation Pulse.