The police in Bangladesh still seem to have little regard for negotiation as a tactic to deal with crowds. This remains the uncomfortable starting point for any honest conversation about how police officers behave on the streets. In most functioning democracies, crowd control is designed to be psychological before it is physical. There is a slow ladder of escalation: hold the line, then use water cannon, then tear gas and then, only as a last resort, batons and non-lethal rounds. The sequence itself sends a message: we are giving you every chance to disperse before we use force. This is designed to exhaust a crowd’s patience without the state surrendering its restraint.
Our police often seem to skip all other rungs of that ladder and land right at the top one. Over the years, we have seen well-known political figures and rights activists thrown to the pavement and beaten on camera. If that is how the state treats people whose names make headlines, one need not wonder how it treats those whose names never do. Ordinary citizens have had their heads struck by batons, been kicked in the chest, and faced force that escalates from zero to maximum in seconds. Sometimes, even a routine scuffle has officers reaching for a non-lethal weapon like a baton—a performance of encountering threat even if it doesn’t exist.
Any skills or orientation gap here is only half the story, however. The other half is that our police have never functioned as a genuinely neutral institution and have too often operated as an extension of whichever party is in government.
Under the Awami League regime, we saw Chhatra League and Jubo League cadres operate in front of police lines during opposition crackdowns: sometimes wearing police body armour, sometimes carrying weapons ranging from sticks and rods to guns, and standing shoulder to shoulder with officers. Party muscle did not need to hide from the state, but rather operated alongside it.
The only discernible change in the force after recent government changes has been in its uniforms. In recent months, opposition activists have made claims of being beaten by ruling party-aligned civilians in police presence. We have also seen local law enforcement invoke prohibitory orders meant to restrict gatherings within a defined area but enforce them far outside that boundary, effectively blocking rival political leaders from ever reaching the zone in question. In at least one such instance, a woman political leader was physically restrained by male officers rather than female personnel. Behind police lines in these standoffs, ruling party-aligned civilians are sometimes seen positioned with sticks and rods.
Sadly, police have not only continued with their old, questionable method of crowd control; in many instances, the force is still flouting rules such as restraining the use of excessive force and producing detainees before a magistrate within 24 hours of arrest or detention. This behaviour by police has continued for decades, regardless of which party held power.
The issue is not that individual officers are naturally cruel, but that the institution itself has never been allowed to function as a neutral public institution. It bends to whoever controls the home ministry. It enforces rules selectively—aggressively against the opposition of the day, permissively towards the ruling party’s own enforcers. Every government in Bangladesh’s history has used some version of this playbook, which means the problem is not simply one part but the absence of a structure that makes partisan capture difficult.
Political pressure lands on police leadership to clear a street “by any means necessary,” and that pressure does not stop at the top. It is passed down, order by order, until it reaches a young constable holding a baton. He follows the order not necessarily because he is uniquely violent, but because refusing will face him with consequences. This is the mechanism that can turn junior officers into instruments of violence—a chain of command that launders an unlawful instruction into a routine task until the person swinging the baton no longer sees a choice, only an order.
We saw where that chain ended in July 2024. Police fired at unarmed people who were simply walking down the street or standing on their own balconies. They did not even spare journalists who were doing nothing but carrying out their professional duties. That was not riot control. It was an enforcement apparatus treating people as targets rather than as lawful citizens to be protected and a situation to be managed or negotiated. An unlawful order does not become lawful when a superior issues it. “I was following orders” has never been an acceptable defence for atrocities under any legal principles.
The question is, how do we address this problem? Why does it persist despite the fall of an authoritarian regime and the apparent political consensus about never returning to the pre-uprising ways of governance? Retraining constables and junior officers in de-escalation is necessary but insufficient as this approach treats a structural failure as a skills problem. Real reform would need to go further.
First, officers who give unlawful orders—to crack down on unarmed crowds, selectively enforce Section 144, or stand down while party muscle assaults opposition figures—must be prosecutable for the consequences, rather than shielded because they never personally swung a baton. Second, there must be an independent police complaints body, insulated from the control of the home ministry, with actual powers to investigate, suspend, and refer cases for prosecution. It must be different from the internal, self-policing model that can simply absorb complaints.
Third, there must be whistleblower and refusal protections for junior officers, so that declining an illegal order is a protected act rather than a career-ending one. Fourth, there should be a clearly enforced line between ruling party workers and police operations, with no party cadres given de facto immunity to act as an auxiliary force. Lastly, there should be uniform enforcement of procedural safeguards, such as requiring female officers to handle female detainees or protesters, etc.
These may seem like minor rules, but when they are ignored, it allows larger rules to be ignored. These form the baseline for a police force that is answerable to the law rather than to a ruling party. Until refusing an illegal order becomes safer than obeying one, and until party colours stop determining whom the police protect and whom they crack down on, we may have to keep asking why our police cannot control a crowd without cracking a skull, or protect a citizen from an unruly mob.
Kazi Ahnaf Tahmid is a political activist.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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