IN RECENT weeks, one police officer has once again come to symbolise a deeper truth about policing in Bangladesh. Mohammad Masud Alam, deputy commissioner of Ramna Division, embodies a style of policing that is performative and deeply invested in visibility. Videos circulating online show him leading anti-narcotics drives in public parks, confronting young people, interrogating students and presiding over operations that appear designed as much for spectacle as for enforcement. In one widely shared incident near Dhaka University, students sitting and eating in Suhrawardy Udyan were detained, beaten and humiliated, even after officers reportedly found nothing illegal. Journalists covering the raid were also assaulted. The episode crystallises a policing logic long in place: asserting authority over presence, behaviour and youth.
What makes the current wave of night-time raids and teenage detentions particularly striking is not simply their brutality, but their trigger. The operational shift appears to have followed a public directive from the education minister, who called for strict action against teenagers roaming at night. Within days, police across multiple districts began detaining minors, questioning young people without specific suspicion and conducting aggressive sweeps of public spaces. In Chandpur, teenagers were detained solely for being outdoors after dark and released only after guardians intervened. In Dhaka, similar operations unfolded with increasing intensity. The sequence of events reveals something profoundly troubling: a policing apparatus responding not to crime patterns or investigative necessity, but to political signalling from a ministry that does not constitutionally control law enforcement.
This inversion of institutional logic would be absurd if it were not so dangerous. Police are administratively accountable to the home ministry, not the education ministry. Law enforcement priorities are meant to emerge from legal frameworks, crime analysis and operational command. Yet the rapid alignment of police activity with the education minister’s remarks suggests a system in which political rhetoric, regardless of source, functions as operational instruction. The result is a policing culture that responds less to law than to signal.
Signal-based policing has predictable characteristics. It is highly visible. It targets accessible populations, particularly youth. It prioritises public confrontation over investigative discretion. It produces viral imagery. The operations led by officer in question exemplify this pattern: raids conducted with large contingents, cameras present, individuals publicly questioned, searched and sometimes assaulted. The objective extends beyond crime prevention to behavioural demonstration. The message is that authority will be seen, felt and remembered.
Such policing inevitably drifts into moral regulation. When teenagers are detained not for committing crimes but for existing in public space at a particular hour, the boundary between law enforcement and social discipline collapses. Presence becomes suspicion. Youth becomes risk. Public space becomes conditional. Police become arbiters of acceptable behaviour. This transformation is subtle but profound. It redefines citizens not as rights-bearing individuals, but as subjects whose freedom depends on compliance with informal expectations.
The violence inflicted on students and journalists during the Suhrawardy Udyan raid illustrates the operational consequences of this mindset. Individuals were beaten even after being found innocent, demonstrating that the purpose of the operation was not evidentiary enforcement but behavioural correction. Force becomes routine, intrinsic to the logic of intimidation.
The institutional response was equally revealing. Dhaka Metropolitan Police announced that four constables had been withdrawn from active duty in connection with the incident. Yet the operation itself had been conducted under the divisional deputy commissioner who led the raid on the ground. This pattern of downward disciplinary action and upward continuity exposed a familiar institutional reflex: accountability is imposed on the lowest ranks, while command authority remains structurally undisturbed. Such responses preserve the appearance of corrective action without confronting the operational logic that made abuse possible.
What followed deepened the contradiction. Even as public criticism intensified over the university raid, this officer reappeared almost immediately at the centre of a separate, highly publicised police operation linked to a kidnapping case. An officer under scrutiny was simultaneously repositioned within a narrative of institutional effectiveness. This oscillation between condemnation and glorification reflects a system that treats controversy not as disqualification, but as interruption. Officers who embody aggressive enforcement are recalibrated, recirculated and restored. Public outrage is absorbed, reputations are rehabilitated and the underlying operational philosophy emerges intact.
This continuity transcends governments. Bangladesh’s policing culture has demonstrated remarkable resilience across political transitions. Regimes change. Rhetoric shifts. But the underlying relationship between political authority and law enforcement remains intact. Police function not merely as neutral enforcers, but as instruments through which authority is projected and stabilised. Operational posture adjusts to political expectations, whether explicitly communicated or implicitly understood.
The recent focus on youth mobility is particularly significant. Young people represent both demographic energy and political uncertainty. They are more likely to occupy public space, to gather spontaneously, and to participate in protests. Controlling their movement, even under the pretext of crime prevention, has broader political implications. It introduces friction into public assembly, normalises surveillance and conditions a generation to associate public presence with vulnerability.
This conditioning operates psychologically as much as physically. Knowledge that one may be stopped, questioned, or assaulted simply for being outside at night alters behaviour. It encourages self-restriction, reduces spontaneous interaction, and shrinks the functional boundaries of public space. The objective need not be mass arrest. The mere possibility of confrontation is sufficient to produce compliance.
The performative dimension amplifies impact. Viral videos extend policing beyond the immediate site of enforcement. Each recorded confrontation becomes a demonstration of authority viewed by thousands. Visibility becomes a multiplier of deterrence and reinforces the personal branding of officers associated with aggressive enforcement. Institutional authority and individual persona begin to blur.
The deeper danger lies in normalisation. When aggressive night-time raids become routine, they cease to provoke sustained scrutiny. They become part of the accepted governance landscape. Citizens adjust expectations downward. Rights become negotiable. Accountability becomes episodic rather than structural.
The crisis of legitimacy that engulfed the police after the July uprising exposed the institutional character of policing in Bangladesh. Yet what followed was not structural reform but institutional continuity. There were no visible restructuring of command culture and no demonstrable shift in how authority was exercised. The institution moved forward largely intact, preserving both personnel and operational reflexes. Continuity remained evident during the interim period, when police continued to confront protests with force and it persists under the elected government. Authority continues to be exercised demonstratively, while accountability remains selective and limited.
The post-July moment did not produce a transformed police force; it produced a continuation of the same system, stabilised by endurance, where power absorbs criticism and proceeds largely undisturbed. This is not simply a failure of reform. It is policing as political projection. Until that equilibrium is challenged, citizens will continue to discover that their presence in public space is conditional, their innocence insufficient protection and their freedom subject not only to law, but to power’s capacity to endure.
Rafia Tamanna is an editorial assistant at New Age.
