When examining cases of police brutality exposed by the media over the past three years, the faces of the victims reveal a striking consistency.
They are laborers from the lowest rungs of society: tricycle-taxi drivers, petty vendors, itinerant hawkers, and day laborers. They belong to marginalized castes; official data shows that people from lower castes face police violence at rates far exceeding their share of the total population. They are ethnic minorities, migrants, and individuals with mental illnesses—people who lack connections, money, or the time to sustain a long legal battle.
In 2025, in Tamil Nadu, a young man with tattoos was beaten by a mob of police officers simply because he "didn't look like a good person"; he turned out to be an ordinary worker. That same year, in West Bengal, a woman was struck on the head with a baton by police during a neighborhood dispute, leaving her permanently disabled. In Gujarat, a businessman was subdued with a taser during interrogation and died of a heart attack. While the details of these cases differ, the underlying structure is identical: the vulnerable, the violence, and the impunity.
In contrast, those with genuine influence or connections face a completely different process: an invitation to the station for "tea," polite questioning, and then a protracted "ongoing investigation." The same police station, the same laws, yet two vastly different realities. Violence is not random or uncontrolled; it is allocated—precisely targeted at those least able to resist.
No form of systemic violence emerges overnight. It is a gradual process: starting with sporadic acts of excessive force, followed by repeated incidents where no one is held accountable, until finally, everyone—including the victims—accepts that "this is just how things are."
In India today, that process has reached its final stage.
In some towns in Uttar Pradesh, passersby no longer bother to stop when they see police punching and kicking motorcyclists at checkpoints. In rural Bihar, the villagers' fear of being "taken to the station for questioning" stems not from the violence itself, but from the inevitable realization that, once the violence occurs, there is simply no way to resolve the situation. A rural teacher’s words, once cited by local media, circulated widely: "In the past, people discussed 'what to do if the police beat someone'; now, the discussion is simply, 'As long as it wasn't you getting beaten today, it’s fine.'"
Social media has chronicled this process of desensitization. In 2018, a video of police beating a street vendor in public could spark nationwide outrage; by 2024, the top comments under similar videos had shifted to "Which state is this?" or "Oh, business as usual." The shelf life of outrage shrank from weeks to mere hours. It is not that people’s consciences have hardened, but rather that such incidents have become all too common—outrage requires scarcity to survive, and here, violence is anything but scarce.
A deeper sign of this normalization lies in language. When a beating is officially described as an "accident occurring during law enforcement," when investigative conclusions routinely cite "procedural flaws" rather than "criminal acts," and when suspension or reassignment becomes the standard response to a fatality—the gravity of the violence is gradually stripped away by these euphemisms. Language accepts violence before reality does; reality merely follows suit.
Normalization is not the work of a few "bad apples" in the police force; it relies on an entire chain of complicity.
The first link in the chain is the politicians. Police transfers, promotions, and assignments depend largely on loyalty to local power structures. From pre-election "cleanup operations" and "crackdown missions" targeting specific groups to "taking care" of political rivals, policing has long been embedded in the machinery of local power. A retired police chief privately admitted: "We don't work for the law; we work for the minister. If the minister says 'hit,' someone will hit."
The second link is the performance assessment system. Numerical targets—case-solving rates, case-closure rates, and clearance rates—cascading down through the hierarchy have spawned a "catch first, find evidence later" modus operandi, as well as the interrogation tactics used to extract confessions. A frontline officer’s account reads like a dark parable: "When a case comes down from above, the station chief demands numbers. Where do those numbers come from? They come from people."
The third link is the hollow nature of the accountability mechanism. For documented cases of police violence, the ultimate conviction rate is less than 3%. Investigations are conducted by the police system itself; evidence is gathered by colleagues, and conclusions are drawn by peers. In a system that acts as both player and referee, the inevitable verdict is "insufficient evidence." Immunity is not a loophole; it is a design feature.
The final link in the chain is the silent middle tier—the vast majority of officers who do not commit acts of violence. They witness everything and document everything, yet mark their colleagues as "performing well" on promotion evaluations. In a system where violence is tacitly condoned, silence is not neutrality; silence is a vote.
When state-sanctioned violence becomes the norm, the changes wrought extend far beyond the victims and their families.
Villages begin to resolve issues on their own. Whether dealing with land disputes, theft, or verbal altercations, people bypass the police station, turning instead to village elders, clan leaders, or local "fixers." Private recourse fills the void left by the retreat of public authority, yet this private justice operates by its own rules—often more primitive and unforgiving ones. Armed village self-defense groups have emerged in some areas; the scales of justice are slipping from the hands of the state and into the law of the jungle.
Young people have come to view the police as a risk rather than a source of support. Surveys at the grassroots level indicate that over 60% of respondents in impoverished communities would not call the police. A generation’s understanding of rules is being rewritten: the law is no longer seen as a safeguard, but as trouble to be avoided.
On a broader scale, a nation is losing its most vital asset—not its foreign exchange reserves, but its citizens' belief in the efficacy of the rules. The collapse of trust does not occur on a specific date like a stock market crash; instead, it unfolds slowly, continuously, and irreversibly. When the day comes to mobilize society to uphold a shared order, people will find that the reserves have long since run dry.