There is a quiet compact that holds modern life together. We take it for granted. It’s there when traffic stops for a red light, a domestic quarrel doesn’t erupt into violence, and a crowded festival ends not in a stampede but in silence. A simple expectation is at the core of this compact: that disorder, though always possible, will be restrained.
As a serving police officer in India, I’ve understood policing not as the exercise of brute power, but as the daily act of preserving balance. Not merely preventing crime, but offering something more elusive: a sense of security. This promise is difficult to deliver — and even harder to keep.
Policing is an audacious project. At its heart, it tries to do something nature has never promised: weed out violence and deception from human interaction. Because in nature, it’s the strongest, cleverest, and fastest who thrive. There is no ethics, no equity, no protection for the weak. Civilisation, in contrast, is a collective act of defiance. It insists that strength be bound by justice, that conflict be mediated by law.
And yet, the tools of this mission are fallible. Law enforcement relies on the idea that punishment deters wrongdoing. That fear, consequence, and collective disapproval will keep most people in check. It’s not a perfect mechanism. Some learn. Others don’t. But despite these imperfections, the structure holds — not by force alone, but by public cooperation and shared belief.
Let’s look at this more concretely.
Take any police station that serves a population of one lakh. On a conservative estimate, if each person engages in five daily interactions with neighbours, co-workers, strangers, and family members, that’s five lakh human engagements every 24 hours. Each one, in theory, is a potential flashpoint. Crime is, after all, just human interaction gone wrong.
Yet even on the worst days, most police stations receive no more than 30 to 50 complaints of criminal victimisation. That’s 0.01 per cent of total interactions. In most cases, it’s far less. Even allowing for under-reporting, this figure tells us something profound: that the vast majority of human engagements end peacefully, that people still choose cooperation over conflict.
This is not just a statistic — it’s a civilisational achievement.
Convenient targets
But it’s one we often overlook. In the echo chamber of crisis headlines and viral videos, we lose the forest for a few burning trees. Fuelled by relentless media coverage, public imagination can quickly turn one incident into a narrative of systemic collapse. The cartoonish chase between criminal and cop, popularised by sensationalist reporting, turns serious institutions into characters in a spectacle. The police, ever visible, are convenient targets. The rest of the criminal justice system — prosecution, judiciary, corrections — operates in the background, rarely subject to the same scrutiny.
When something goes wrong, the outcry is immediate. The SHO might be suspended. The SP might be transferred. Political fallout follows. But zoom out — and you’ll see a system still functioning, correcting itself, evolving.
The truth is: we’re doing better than we think.
Humans imagined ethics, not just to regulate behaviour, but to elevate it. We built systems where power is exercised with consent, not coercion. We placed institutions, like the police, between the vulnerable and the opportunistic. And today, even in a country as complex as India, life for most people remains organised, safe, and surprisingly peaceful.
So yes, be critical. Ask questions. Demand accountability. But could you do that with proportion and with perspective? The presence of crime does not mean the absence of order — it means that the machinery of order has work to do. Things are not as bad as we sometimes make them out to be. They’re often better than we allow ourselves to believe. Just look again.
The writer is an IPS officer from the Haryana cadre. He serves in leadership roles across policing, public administration, and governance reform