A record of what
the police did.
And a way to ask
who ordered it.

Police use of force in India, incident by incident, with a source behind every line and the gaps named as gaps. No order has been found for any of them. You can ask the offices that hold the records to keep them, in two minutes, from this site.

Latest.

What has been done on this archive, and what a deadline has done. Not what happened at an incident — that lives in the records, with a document behind it.

Every record change, with the commit it landed in →

What is established.

Each line carries the state of the record behind it. Tap a label to see what it means.

Unknown

No order has been found.

One is now referred to. A police diary entry is reported to record that the munitions used at Jantar Mantar were used under the orders of a Deputy Commissioner of Police. A report that an order was given is not the order. We do not hold the entry either: we hold two newspapers' accounts of it.

The count above stays at zero because it counts orders in our hands.

What the diary entry is reported to say →
Help find the order →

Why that matters.

Police can use force. There are rules about who may authorise it, and those rules require somebody to decide, and often to write it down.

The number of offices empowered to make that decision is not zero. What is zero is the number of documents showing that any of them did. An office with the power to order something is not an office shown to have ordered it, and this site does not treat the first as evidence of the second anywhere.

The records that would settle it are held by district police offices and kept on a retention schedule, so they are erased on a timetable whether or not anyone asks.

Ask four Bihar offices to keep theirs →

How it works. Three steps.

01

Someone asks

A document is requested from the office that holds it, or sent in by someone who has it. The request goes on the public list the day it is filed.

02

It gets checked

Against its original source. Then it is filed with two lines: what it proves, and what it does not. Nothing is published on trust.

03

The record moves

A question changes state only when a document changes it. Silence from an office is recorded too, with the date it fell due.

What we are looking for.

Somebody filed it, carried it, was briefed from it, or received a copy.