Who Do the Police Serve? Rethinking Police Accountability in India

July 30, 2026

There is a specific, recognizable feeling many Indians have described when a police vehicle slows down beside them for no obvious reason: not relief, but a small jolt of calculation — have I done anything, do I have my papers, should I look at my phone or put it away. It is a strange thing for a citizen to feel toward the institution whose entire stated purpose is to protect them. And it is not a universal feeling; plenty of Indians, in plenty of situations, experience the police as helpful, responsive, and fair. But the fact that so many others reflexively brace rather than relax is itself data, and it points to a question worth asking directly: does the Indian police force exist primarily to serve the public, or to serve whoever currently controls the state machinery?

This is not a rhetorical question designed to indict individual officers, the overwhelming majority of whom are underpaid, overworked, and operating inside a system they did not design. It is a structural question about accountability — about who a police officer actually answers to when a superior gives an order that conflicts with the law, and what happens to that officer's career if they refuse. Public trust in policing, in any democracy, does not rest on law enforcement alone. It rests on three things working together: enforcement, transparency, and independence from whoever happens to hold political power at a given moment. In India, the first of these has always been present in some form. The other two have consistently lagged — and the gap between them is where a great deal of public trust has quietly leaked out.

The Colonial Skeleton Still Standing

To understand why Indian policing works the way it does, it helps to go back to the document that still, remarkably, forms its legal backbone in many states: the Police Act of 1861.

The Act was drafted in direct response to the 1857 revolt, under a Police Commission chaired by M.H. Court, and modeled on Ireland's Royal Irish Constabulary rather than London's civilian Metropolitan Police. That choice of model was not incidental. The Royal Irish Constabulary was itself designed as a paramilitary force for governing a resistant colonized population, and the British consciously imported that template to India rather than the community-oriented Metropolitan Police model used at home. The resulting force was centralized, hierarchical, and placed under the administrative control of the District Magistrate — a colonial civil servant answerable to the Crown, not to the people being policed. Its explicit purpose, as colonial administrators themselves described it, was to develop a "disciplined and loyal" force that would support colonial administration, suppress uprisings, and protect revenue collection — not a public service charter built around citizen welfare. Even the 1902 Indian Police Commission's efforts at reform — better training, curbing torture — went largely unimplemented; Indians were barred from senior superintendent ranks until 1920, and even by 1931 held only about 20% of those posts.

What makes this history more than an antiquarian footnote is how much of that architecture survived independence intact. The basic chain of command — a police officer whose transfers, postings, and career prospects are controlled by political executives rather than an independent authority — persisted largely unchanged, even after the Constitution formally subordinated all state action to constitutional rather than colonial authority. Despite Supreme Court directions, many states have shown only partial compliance in replacing the 1861 Act altogether, in part precisely because the Act's structure hands the political executive a degree of control over the police that newer, more independent models would take away. In effect, India built a democracy in 1950 and then largely kept the policing apparatus of the empire it had just left, arguing over amendments to it for the next seventy-five years rather than starting over.

When Force Meets the Street: Recent Flashpoints

Abstract institutional critique becomes concrete fastest in moments of public confrontation, and India has had no shortage of these in the last few years.

The most recent and, in scale, one of the most significant occurred in New Delhi in July 2026. Protests that began in June, initially over the mismanagement of the NEET-UG medical entrance examination — a leak scandal serious enough that authorities canceled results for over two million students and required a nationwide retest — broadened over subsequent weeks into a wider youth-led movement, organized under the banner of the "Cockroach Janta Party," that folded in grievances about unemployment and government accountability more generally. Matters escalated after Delhi police forcibly removed activist Sonam Wangchuk from a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar on July 18 and hospitalized him. On July 20, tens of thousands marched toward Parliament calling for the education minister's resignation. Delhi Police, according to multiple independent accounts, deployed baton charges and tear gas against what witnesses and organizers described as a largely peaceful crowd; The Wire reported thousands of injuries, some serious. Human Rights Watch documented the police response and called on the government to investigate it; Amnesty International's India chapter said the images from the protest showed "how peaceful dissent is being suppressed in India," while noting the additional restriction of mobile internet and metro suspensions around the protest site. The Delhi Police's own position, as reported, was that protesters had breached lawful barricades, attempted to march toward Parliament without authorization, and endangered public order — a justification the force has offered in broadly similar language after previous large-scale crackdowns. When opposition leaders sought judicial intervention, the Supreme Court reportedly declined to hear the plea, telling petitioners not to "waste our time."

It is worth being precise about what is established fact here and what remains contested. That protests occurred, that police used batons and tear gas, that internet and metro services were suspended, and that international and domestic human rights organizations characterized the force used as excessive — these are well-documented. Whether every individual baton charge was proportionate to a specific, immediate threat, and whether isolated incidents of protester aggression (Delhi Police has separately registered cases alleging protesters used pepper spray on officers at an unrelated November 2025 demonstration) justified the broader scale of the response, are questions that would ordinarily be resolved by an independent inquiry — precisely the kind of body India's policing system, as currently structured, does not reliably produce. This is not a uniquely 2026 phenomenon; farmers' protests in 2020–21, the anti-CAA demonstrations of 2019–20, and student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia in the same period each generated comparable, still-unresolved disputes over whether force used matched the threat actually posed.

Why the Police Look Politically Captured

The recurring pattern across these episodes — force deployed at a scale that draws international concern, followed by little independent investigation and no meaningful institutional consequence — is not an accident of any single police force's culture. It reflects a structural reality: in most Indian states, senior police leadership serves largely at the pleasure of the state's political executive.

Directors General of Police and Superintendents of Police can be transferred, and frequently are, at the discretion of state governments, with postings sometimes changing within months of an inconvenient decision. Because promotion, posting to a desirable district, and career survival all run through the same political channel, officers have a structural incentive to anticipate what the government in power wants rather than what the law or Constitution requires — not necessarily out of personal conviction, but out of professional self-preservation. This dynamic is precisely what the Supreme Court addressed in one of the most significant, and most persistently ignored, judgments in Indian constitutional history: Prakash Singh v. Union of India.

Prakash Singh, a former Director General of Police in Uttar Pradesh and Assam, filed a public interest litigation in 1996 seeking implementation of long-shelved recommendations from the National Police Commission of the late 1970s. On September 22, 2006, the Supreme Court finally ruled, issuing seven binding directives to every state and union territory: constitute a State Security Commission to insulate police from unwarranted political interference and set broad policy; ensure the Director General of Police is selected through a merit-based, UPSC-linked process and given a minimum tenure so they cannot be arbitrarily removed; give a similar minimum tenure to officers in operational roles like Superintendents of Police and Station House Officers; separate investigation functions from law-and-order duties, since the same officer juggling crowd control and evidence-gathering compromises both; set up Police Establishment Boards to depoliticize transfers and postings; create Police Complaints Authorities at the state and district levels to handle public grievances against police misconduct; and establish a National Security Commission for central police organizations.

Nearly two decades later, compliance remains, in the words of the Court-appointed Thomas Committee's own 2010 final report, largely "paper" compliance rather than genuine reform. As of 2020, not a single state was found to be fully compliant with all seven directives, even as roughly 18 states had passed or amended their own Police Acts in the intervening years — new laws that frequently retained the same core mechanism of executive control the judgment was designed to remove. The pattern is consistent enough that it reads less like inertia and more like a considered political preference: control over the police, across parties and across states, is treated as too valuable a lever of power for any incumbent government to voluntarily surrender.

What the Public Actually Says

None of this would matter as much if it were simply an elite legal debate disconnected from lived experience. It isn't. India has some of the most detailed public survey data in the world specifically measuring how citizens experience their police, through the Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR), produced periodically by Lokniti–CSDS in partnership with Common Cause.

Successive rounds of this survey have found strikingly consistent patterns: trust in police is measurably lowest among Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, and the poor — precisely the groups with the least political power to hold the institution accountable when something goes wrong. Roughly two in five Indians report feeling afraid of the police rather than reassured by their presence, a proportion that rises sharply among religious and caste minorities. Satisfaction levels vary enormously by state, with less than one in ten residents in some states reporting satisfaction with their local police force. The SPIR's most recent rounds have focused specifically on custodial torture, finding a disturbing normalization of the practice — not only among segments of the public who believe some degree of "third-degree" treatment is an acceptable response to crime, but within the survey of serving police personnel itself, a majority of whom expressed some degree of comfort with the idea that violence is sometimes a legitimate investigative tool.

Official data reinforces the perception. National Crime Records Bureau figures compiled over two decades show 1,888 custodial deaths reported across India between 2001 and 2020, of which cases were registered against police personnel in 893 instances, chargesheets filed against 358 personnel — and just 26 convictions. That conviction rate, well under 3% of registered custodial death cases, is not a statistic that supports confidence in the system's willingness or capacity to hold its own accountable. Retired DGP Prakash Singh, commenting on one recent custodial death case, put it plainly: the flaws in how police investigate themselves need to be acknowledged and corrected — a striking admission from the very officer whose litigation produced the reform framework that has since gone largely unimplemented.

Looking Elsewhere: How Other Democracies Try to Solve This

India is far from the only democracy wrestling with how to make police accountable to the public rather than only to the state. Different countries have tried structurally different answers, each with real trade-offs.

In the United States, most of the roughly 3,000 county sheriffs are directly elected by voters, a practice dating to the colonial period and enshrined in most state constitutions — making the sheriff, in many counties, the only senior law enforcement official whose job depends on facing the electorate rather than pleasing a political appointer. Proponents argue this creates a direct accountability link: campaigns force public debate over use-of-force policy, jail conditions, and transparency, and a sheriff who loses public confidence can simply be voted out rather than protected by a governor. Critics point to real downsides — research on elected prosecutors and judges (a closely related phenomenon) suggests officials facing re-election often trend more punitive as elections approach, and controversial elected sheriffs like Arizona's Joe Arpaio have shown how an elected law-enforcement office can become a personal political brand resistant to any oversight beyond the ballot box itself. It's also worth noting that elected sheriffs coexist alongside far more numerous appointed municipal police chiefs in the American system — elected sheriffs are common in many counties, not a universal national model, and some counties have historically formed separate appointed police departments specifically to route around an unpopular elected sheriff.

England and Wales took a related but distinct path in 2012, replacing largely invisible, unelected police authorities with directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) — politicians who set budgets and policing priorities for a force, and can remove an underperforming Chief Constable, without personally commanding operations day to day. The reform was explicitly justified by the government as trading unaccountable oversight bodies for ones the public could see and vote out. Scholarly comparisons to the American sheriff model have noted the structural difference is significant: a sheriff is a working law-enforcement officer, while a PCC is a civilian overseer holding a professional police chief accountable — arguably a cleaner separation between political accountability and operational policing than the U.S. model provides. Critics within British policing itself, including police federation representatives, warned at the time that the office risked politicizing operational decisions that should rest on professional judgment rather than electoral popularity; turnout in the first PCC elections was notably low, at around 18%, raising its own questions about how much democratic legitimacy the office actually carries in practice.

Northern Ireland's Police Ombudsman, created under the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement's broader settlement, offers a different model again: rather than an elected overseer, an entirely independent statutory body — separate from both the police service and the government of the day — investigates every public complaint against the police, with no route for internal police self-investigation of serious incidents. It emerged specifically because a large share of Northern Ireland's Catholic population had, in the words of the review that led to its creation, "little or no confidence in the fairness of the police," a legitimacy crisis with obvious resonance for the way many Indian minority communities describe their own relationship with the police today. The Ombudsman model has since influenced police oversight reform in several other jurisdictions, precisely because full independence from the police it investigates — something India's own complaints mechanisms largely still lack — has proven to matter more for public trust than any other single design feature.

A Proposal Worth Taking Seriously: Elected District Police Chiefs, With the Right of Recall

Given all of this — a colonial command structure that survived into the republic largely intact, a landmark Supreme Court judgment that states have quietly slow-walked for two decades, survey data showing trust concentrated lowest exactly where accountability is weakest, and a global track record of experiments in bringing police oversight closer to the public — it is worth asking seriously whether India needs a more direct structural fix than another round of committee recommendations. One option, drawing on elements of both the American sheriff model and the British PCC model but adapted to Indian conditions, deserves serious consideration: direct election of district-level police chiefs (the Superintendent of Police, or equivalent), with a formal right of citizen recall.

The case for this rests on more than borrowed enthusiasm for foreign models; it follows directly from the diagnosis above.

It attacks the precise mechanism Prakash Singh identified as the root problem. The Supreme Court's 2006 judgment was fundamentally about one thing: breaking the link between a police officer's career survival and the goodwill of the political executive. Fixed tenure, as ordered by the Court, tries to solve this by making an officer harder to arbitrarily transfer — but a state government still controls the initial appointment, still influences promotion beyond the district level, and still shapes the officer's career horizon after that fixed term ends. An elected district police chief answers to neither the Chief Minister's office nor the state's political machinery for their immediate survival in the post; they answer to the district's voters at the next election. This does not eliminate political incentives from policing — nothing can — but it relocates those incentives from a single state government's preferences to the broader, harder-to-capture judgment of an entire district electorate, which is precisely the shift in accountability the Court's own reasoning in Prakash Singh was reaching for without being able to mandate it through judicial directive alone.

It directly addresses the trust gap the SPIR data documents. If the communities reporting the lowest trust in police — Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, the poor — are disproportionately concentrated in specific districts, a district-level electoral mechanism gives exactly those communities a lever they currently do not have: the ability to vote out a police leadership they experience as biased or abusive, rather than relying entirely on a state government that may have every incentive to protect an officer who delivers order at the cost of fairness. The right of recall matters here specifically because a single election every five years is too blunt an instrument to address abuses that surface mid-term — a recall mechanism, with a reasonably high but achievable signature threshold to prevent frivolous misuse, gives a district the power to remove a police chief within their term if serious misconduct comes to light, rather than waiting years for the next scheduled vote.

It offers a structural counterweight to the exact pattern seen in the July 2026 Delhi protests and their predecessors. An appointed police leadership answering to the state government that ordered a crackdown has little independent incentive to conduct a genuine post-facto reckoning with how that crackdown was handled — the political principal and the operational commander share an interest in defending the decision. An elected chief, particularly one who did not personally order a controversial operation and who must face the same electorate that witnessed it, has a structurally different incentive: to be seen investigating and correcting excessive force, not covering for it, because their own re-election depends on the district's assessment of their conduct rather than a state government's approval.

It has a working, if imperfect, comparative precedent. As detailed above, elected sheriffs have operated continuously in the majority of American counties for well over a century, and Police and Crime Commissioners have functioned in England and Wales since 2012. Neither model is without flaws — the tendency toward "tough on crime" positioning near elections, the risk of an elected office becoming a personal political brand, the genuine question of whether the public has the specialized knowledge to judge operational policing choices — and any Indian adaptation should be built with these documented failure modes explicitly in mind rather than importing the models uncritically. But the existence of two functioning, decades-old democratic precedents for directly accountable local policing leadership is itself evidence that the idea is administratively workable, not merely a thought experiment; it has already been tested at scale, in two large democracies, over a long enough period to generate real data about what goes wrong and how to design around it.

It would need real safeguards to avoid its own predictable failure modes. An honest case for this proposal has to acknowledge the international evidence on its risks. Investigation and prosecution functions should sit with a separate, professionally staffed body, so an elected chief cannot use the office to selectively shield allies or target opponents; the American experience of elected sheriffs and prosecutors trending punitive near election time argues for pairing any Indian version with independent oversight of use-of-force incidents, closer to Northern Ireland's fully independent Ombudsman than to internal departmental review. Candidate eligibility should require the same professional qualifications India already demands of IPS-track officers, so the office stays a professional policing role subject to democratic accountability rather than becoming a contest divorced from law-enforcement competence. And the roughly 18% turnout in Britain's first PCC elections is a caution: without genuine public education and campaign visibility, an elected police-chief system risks trading one weak accountability structure for another.

None of this makes the proposal risk-free, and reasonable people, including experienced police reformers, could object that Indian district politics — often shaped by caste blocs, local patronage, and communal mobilization — might produce police chiefs who serve a district's dominant faction rather than all of its residents evenly, recreating the same capture problem at a smaller scale. That is a serious objection: it argues for pairing direct election with strong minimum professional qualifications and a genuinely independent complaints and investigation body sitting alongside the elected chief, not for abandoning direct accountability altogether. The status quo has already produced capture by whichever faction controls the state government; the real question is whether a district-level, recallable structure leaves citizens with more genuine recourse than the current one does. Given two decades of near-total non-implementation of the alternative the Supreme Court already ordered, it deserves serious legislative debate rather than reflexive dismissal.

What Else Experts Have Recommended

Direct election is one structural option among several that reform advocates, retired officers, and constitutional experts have proposed, and it need not stand alone. The Prakash Singh directives themselves remain the baseline that no state has fully implemented: independent State Security Commissions, fixed and merit-based tenure for senior officers, separation of investigation from law-and-order functions, and functioning Police Complaints Authorities at both state and district level. Beyond these, the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, the Justice Verma Committee (convened after the 2012 Delhi gang rape case specifically to examine police accountability failures), and multiple Law Commission reports have converged on a broadly overlapping set of additional recommendations: mandatory body-worn cameras for officers engaged in crowd-control and arrest operations, to create an objective record independent of competing witness accounts; substantially expanded human rights and de-escalation training, particularly for handling public protests without resorting to baton charges and tear gas as a first response; genuinely independent judicial oversight of custodial deaths, rather than the current system in which police-conducted magisterial inquiries dominate; public disciplinary proceedings rather than internal departmental hearings shielded from scrutiny; reformed recruitment with psychological screening designed to identify candidates unsuited to the pressures of frontline policing; a genuine shift toward community policing models that build ongoing relationships between officers and the neighborhoods they serve, rather than encounters occurring only during arrests or crises; and sustained investment in forensic and investigative capacity, so that police success is measured by conviction rates built on evidence rather than by confession rates built on coercion.

Can Trust Actually Be Rebuilt?

It is worth stating plainly why any of this is worth the political difficulty of pursuing. Democratic policing is not simply law enforcement backed by force; it is law enforcement that draws its legitimacy from public consent, because a police force that the public actively fears or distrusts loses access to the single resource it needs most to function effectively — voluntary cooperation. Witnesses who trust the police report crimes and give honest testimony; those who don't, stay silent, and cases collapse for lack of evidence rather than lack of guilt. Communities that trust the police share information that prevents crime before it happens; those that don't, treat every police presence as a threat to be managed rather than a resource to be used. This is not an abstract or sentimental point — it is the empirical foundation of why community policing models consistently outperform purely coercive ones on solved-case rates in comparative criminology research, and why the SPIR's finding that trust is lowest exactly among India's most vulnerable communities should be read as a live operational problem for crime-fighting capacity, not only a civil liberties concern.

Accountability, in other words, does not weaken policing — it is what makes policing actually work over the long run, by giving citizens a reason to cooperate with an institution instead of merely submitting to it. Officers themselves stand to gain from this too: a genuinely independent complaints and oversight system protects honest officers from being scapegoated for decisions made under political pressure from above, just as much as it protects citizens from officers who abuse their power. The current arrangement, in which senior officers answer primarily upward to political leadership rather than outward to the public they serve, serves neither group especially well — it leaves citizens with weak recourse and leaves professional, rule-following officers exposed whenever a political principal's interests and the law happen to diverge.

Conclusion

In a constitutional democracy, a police force's legitimacy does not originate from whichever party currently controls the state government. It originates from the Constitution and from the consent of the people the force is sworn to protect — a distinction that sounds obvious stated plainly, and yet is precisely the distinction that India's policing architecture, inherited largely intact from a colonial administration explicitly designed to answer to power rather than to the public, has never fully made. Twenty years after the Supreme Court laid out a clear, binding path toward correcting this in Prakash Singh, most of that path remains unwalked. The events at Jantar Mantar in July 2026 were not an aberration from that pattern; they were a fairly predictable expression of it.

None of the options on the table — the original Prakash Singh directives, body cameras, independent complaints authorities, community policing, or a more structurally ambitious step like directly elected, recallable district police chiefs — is a complete solution on its own, and each carries real trade-offs that deserve honest scrutiny rather than either uncritical advocacy or reflexive dismissal. But the cost of continuing to do very little, as the last two decades have demonstrated, is not neutral. It is measured in a conviction rate for custodial deaths under three percent, in communities that report bracing rather than relaxing at the sight of a uniform, and in a public order strategy that reaches for tear gas before it reaches for dialogue. Professional, impartial, and accountable policing is not a luxury a young, populous, and increasingly assertive democracy can indefinitely postpone. It is close to the precondition for the rest of the constitutional project to hold.

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