Find the order.
Name the office.
Publish the gap.
A public record of police use of force in India, and of who authorised it. Every claim sourced. Every gap named. Anyone can add a document.
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.
What is established.
Each line carries the state of the record behind it. Tap a label to see what it means.
Were you there?
Then you may already be holding a piece of this record.
A photo or video
Off the device that took it, not a forwarded copy. The original file carries the time and place.
Send it →A paper
A notice, a receipt, a hospital slip, a copy of an FIR, a letter from an office.
Send it →Ten minutes
Anyone can ask a public office for a document. Pick a question and file it yourself.
See what we asked →Nothing you send goes public automatically, and your name is never published unless you ask for it.
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. That is the nearest this record has come, and it is still not an order: a report that an order was given is not the order, and this archive does not hold the entry either — it holds two newspapers' accounts of it.
The count above stays at zero because it counts orders in our hands. It is the one number on this site that we will not move for anything less than the document.
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.
This record maps the offices empowered to make that decision, and that number is not zero. What is zero is the number of documents showing that any of them did. Keeping those two apart is the whole method: an office with the power to order something is not an office shown to have ordered it, and this site will not print the second because it has established the first.
How close is the order?
Five steps between nothing and the document. Each one is reached only when a published record reaches it, so this is a claim about the archive that is sourced like every other claim on it. Shown for Jantar Mantar, which is the furthest along.
There is no percentage here, and there will not be one. A percentage needs to know how much work is left. Nobody does. Eighty per cent of the way to what, out of how much nobody has scoped?
A made-up number would also be the sentence that got quoted, and there would be no document behind it — which is the failure this whole site is arranged to avoid. Steps can be counted because each one is a fact. Distance cannot.
The other three incidents have taken none of these steps. Nothing on the record yet asserts that anyone ordered the force used in Bihar, in Siwan or in Maharashtra, and that is a worse position than Delhi rather than the same one.
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.
Questions.
Longer version: how to read this record · how we check things