Loving and Hating the Police
Violence, Authority and the Paradox of Order
Oct 20, 2026 · @Prasanna
If there is space for violence, the answer has always been yes, however in any discussion of social and political progress, one hard truth is usually brushed aside: violence has always shaped the world. Nations are born out of conflict. The great leaps toward freedom and rights have rarely happened through pure pacifism. Even in a democracy, where we rightly champion the rule of law and peaceful debate, violence does not disappear. It is institutionalised. (Except perhaps feminist movement)
An army holds that violence for use against external enemies across clear borders. Inside the nation, the same burden falls on the police, and there it is far more difficult and ambiguous. What is the police for: to protect law and order, to prevent crime, or to keep society stable? If it is all of these, what powers should it have, how much of it do we need, and whom is it really protecting?
This essay argues that the police sit at the sharpest point of a wider crisis of authority. Modern societies have shifted moral legitimacy away from those who hold power and toward those who resist it, while still expecting a uniformed few to hold back chaos. Until we understand that contradiction, we will keep asking the impossible of our police and excusing too much in ourselves.
I. Police Versus Military: When the Enemy Is a Citizen
An army faces a clear enemy across a geopolitical line. Its task may be terrible, but it is not confused. The police operate inside the very population they serve. Their opponent is never a foreign invader. It is a citizen who holds constitutional rights, a vote and a presumption of innocence, and who may be a neighbour tomorrow.
This creates a friction the soldier rarely faces. The lines of engagement are always blurred. The same person may be victim in one call and offender in the next. An officer is expected to enforce laws that are often applied selectively, in a landscape where political pressure, public sentiment and legal duty collide in every hard decision.
The soldier is judged by whether he wins. The officer is judged by whether he used exactly the right amount of force, against the right person, for the right reason, in a few seconds, under the eyes of a public that will later judge him with all the time in the world.
II. Institutional Pressure, Panic and Closed Ranks
Look at police violence across history and a pattern appears. Individual officers rarely use force out of personal malice or private vendetta. Whether they are facing a rioting crowd or a death in custody, the roots are usually systemic: political pressure, accidents, chaos, panic, the stress of an unpredictable situation, or direct orders from above.
This does not excuse the outcome. But it changes where we should look. If we treat every act of police violence as the crime of a bad individual, we punish the person and leave untouched the pressures that will produce the next incident.
There is one important exception. Something closer to real vengeance tends to appear when a member of the force is injured or killed. Then officers close ranks in a tribal reflex of self-preservation. In a job where your life may depend on the person beside you, that solidarity is psychologically understandable. Yet it is also how misconduct gets shielded, and how public trust breaks. The same loyalty that keeps officers alive on the street can turn the force into a closed tribe set against the public it serves.
III. The Migration of Legitimate Force
For millennia, the right to use force was tied to the responsibility to protect and provide. The father, the teacher, the king and the state held authority over physical coercion because they were cast as the burden-bearers of the social order. Punishment in the home, the cane in the school and the sovereign's penalties were seen not as abuse but as the painful work of shaping civilised people out of raw chaos.
Modern politics and psychology have reversed this lens.
The inversion of suspicion. Institutional authority is now presumed oppressive. The figure at the top is seen less as a protector and more as a likely abuser of power.
The sympathy shift. Sympathy now flows downward, to the child, the student, the citizen and the marginalised. Force used by those above is increasingly criminalised or shamed, while aggression from those below is often explained as a justified reaction to oppression.
The moral right to use or excuse force has migrated from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom. Much of this change corrected real cruelty; the old authorities were not always the benevolent providers they claimed to be. But the migration left one institution stranded: the police. The father has largely given up the rod, and the teacher the cane. The officer has not been allowed to give up force, because society still needs someone to stop the riot at midnight. He is the last authority still required to use violence, in an age that has decided violence from authority is presumptively wrong.
IV. Sympathy, Subordination and the Rule of Law
Why do citizens, even those critical of state power, still feel sympathy for a police officer? That sympathy rests on three pillars.
No personal agenda. The officer acts not on private whim but as an agent of the state.
Risk absorbed for others. He steps voluntarily into riots, domestic violence and danger to protect strangers.
Restraint within the law. Respect peaks when an officer, under intense provocation, holds back and stays strictly within legal limits, even when those laws are imperfect.
Yet the officer's position is strained from above. Police answer to the political executive. An officer has the legal right to refuse a manifestly unlawful order, but in practice refusal can destroy a career. The public sees the baton; it rarely sees the phone call that ordered it raised.
The officer is also strained from below. The police work in the domain of law, not sentiment. Public outrage and moral panic demand immediate, emotional retribution. A democratic police force is bound by due process. When an officer bows to public sentiment, justice is compromised. When he rigidly enforces an unpopular law, he loses public legitimacy. Either way, he pays.
V. The Wages of Authority
Authority is not only violent; it also takes responsibility, works and provides. A father's discipline came with the grinding duty of feeding and housing a family. A teacher's strictness came with the labour of turning an untrained mind into a capable one. A state's police power carries the burden of keeping chaos at bay so that commerce, art and daily life can exist at all. Modern critiques often see the coercion and forget the burden.
In a sense, people enjoy authority and power, and that enjoyment is the price they receive for providing and sacrificing. Take it away and the question is unavoidable: what replaces it? Why should a teacher teach with passion if she has no control over her class? Why should a father provide if his children feel no duty to help or obey? Why should an officer walk into a riot if his authority is mocked by the crowd and disowned by his superiors? A society that enforces only rights will slowly run out of people willing to carry duties.
Part of what authority receives is respect, and respect is above all behaviour: listening, accepting correction, following instructions without demanding a justification each time. It comes partly from the position itself. In Japan, a teacher is respected before proving she is a good teacher, because society lends that respect in advance: parents back her and the culture honours the role.
A disordered classroom shows what happens when that loan is withdrawn. If students riot and no one works, a teacher cannot plead her way back to order. Respect is restored through consequences, not physical but real and certain, delivered calmly and backed by the school. Without that backing, she is weaker every time she tries.
The police face the same problem on a far larger scale. An officer's authority is also a loan from society. When politicians disown him, when the public treats every use of force as abuse, and when the institution does not stand behind lawful action, he is left with only two choices: excessive force, or none at all. Both erode order. Respect for the uniform is not a gift to the police; it is one of the conditions that makes restrained policing possible.
VI. Can a Force Be Both Firm and Empathetic?
This brings us to the central paradox of police reform. Can a force be firm, even feared, and yet deeply empathetic?
Policing has traditionally swung between two failures. One is the authoritarian model of fear and total compliance, which breeds terror and alienation. The other is a pure community-relations model, which often collapses when it meets real volatility: organised crime, mobs and violent riots.
An individual officer cannot wear both masks at once without cracking under the weight. Asking him to be a gentle counsellor one second and a wall against violent chaos the next is asking for the superhuman.
The answer is not to choose one mask, but to order them. Firmness is accepted when it is predictable, lawful and impersonal: the rule applying itself, not an officer's temper. Empathy becomes possible once order is secured, as it does for the teacher whose class is finally calm. Where the roles are too far apart, they should be separated: crisis responders for mental-health calls, trained units for riots, and patient community officers for everything between. What breeds hatred of the police is rarely firmness. It is arbitrariness.
VII. Anger Without a Self
If legitimacy has migrated toward those who resist authority, we must ask what their resistance can achieve. The rebellion of the marginalised can tear down structures, shatter taboos and expose unjust hierarchies. But protest alone cannot build a society. What separates rebellion that builds from rebellion that only destroys?
The answer is whether the angry person locates himself within his anger.
This is not a demand for guilt. Locating oneself in one's anger is not an indictment or a self-accusation, not a confession that "I too am to blame." It means the anger carries something of the person himself, something he owns and is answerable for:
Desire. A positive wanting of something better, not only hatred of what exists. Not just "down with this," but "I want that."
The ability to take on responsibility. A willingness and capacity to carry the burden that authority has carried: to provide, to organise, to answer for consequences. If the old structure falls, he is ready to help hold up what replaces it.
Vision. An idea of what can actually happen next: the institutions, practices and ways of living that would make things better.
Anger with these three is the seed of a new authority. The rebel stops being merely against power and becomes a candidate to share in it, because he offers to carry its burden. India's own freedom movement shows this. Gandhi paired non-cooperation with a constructive programme of khadi, village work and sanitation, and he called off the movement in 1922 when it turned violent at Chauri Chaura. Protest was meant to be joined to responsibility and to a picture of the society to come.
Anger without a self points only outward. Everything wrong belongs to someone else, and nothing is asked of oneself: no desire beyond destruction, no burden accepted, no vision offered. Such anger does not remain politics for long. It becomes:
a venting of violence for its own sake;
an escape from the mundane routine of ordinary life;
an opportunity to loot;
a vicarious feeling of taking part in the fight against "injustice", without bearing its cost or responsibility.
This kind of anger needs authority, because authority is its only target. It has nothing to put in its place.
And this is the crowd the police are sent to face. Their task is impossible in a precise sense: there is no demand they can meet, and no one in the crowd who will take responsibility for what follows. All they can do is hold the line.
VIII. The Demand for Order
And people want the line held. Order is among the most basic human demands, often stronger than the demand for freedom. One reason sections of Indian society accepted the British Raj, especially after 1857, was its firm police and predictable administration. Today, too, governments in some states win real public support for tough, effective policing.
But the Raj also marks the limit of firmness. It was tolerated while it seemed predictable and impersonal. When it became arbitrary and brutal, as at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, it lost the legitimacy that order had bought it. People will accept, even welcome, firm authority, but not arbitrary authority, and not authority that serves only itself.
IX. The Public's Border
We usually analyse policing as a one-way street, where the state acts on the people. That framing quietly absolves the public of its own responsibility. Order is not delivered by the police; it is co-produced by the police and the people together.
When communities stop cultivating their own cohesion, their own ways of resolving conflict and their own sense of civic duty, they place an unbearable load on a small uniformed force. The same applies when families stop teaching discipline and schools lose the means to enforce it: every failure upstream arrives, eventually, at the police station.
Conclusion
Violence has not left the world; it has been gathered into institutions, and the police are where it lives closest to us. We have rightly stripped much of the old authority of its cruelty. But we have also stripped it of its wages: the respect, the backing and the power that made the burden worth carrying. We then left the police as the last authority still required to use force, judged by a public that sympathises with almost anyone except the one who holds the line.
The way out is neither a return to fear nor a surrender to disorder. It is authority that is firm because it is predictable and lawful, answerable to the law rather than to politicians or moods, and backed by a society that lends it respect. It is also a citizenry that co-produces order, and an anger that takes responsibility for what it wants to build.
Until we stop expecting the police to resolve structural, political and social failures through sheer force, and until we decide clearly what we want this institution to be, we will keep trapping both the police and ourselves in an impossible paradox. Rights need duties to stand on, and freedom needs order to exist at all.
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