Real Police Accountability Means Naming Who Struck, Not Just Naming That Force Was Used

Outrage Is Not The Same As Accountability

Everyone watching the videos from Jantar Mantar agrees on one thing: what happened there was wrong. A senior police official allegedly slapping a girl standing nearby. A person in uniform poking a girl from behind as she walked away.

A group surrounding a girl while one of them gropes her and others laugh. Condemning this is easy - almost everyone will do it. The harder, more important question is what happens after the condemnation and that is where most responses to police violence quietly fail.

The Position

TAN's position is this: accountability for what happened at Jantar Mantar means identifying the specific individuals who used force - by name, by badge number, by unit - not simply issuing a general statement that violence occurred and was regrettable.

A society that condemns "police excesses" as an abstract category while never naming a single officer has not held anyone accountable. It has performed accountability while changing nothing about who gets to walk away consequence-free.

Why Naming Names Actually Matters

This isn't a semantic distinction. General condemnation changes nothing about the incentive facing the next officer in the next crowd-control situation, because the lesson learned from vague institutional apologies is that individual identity gets absorbed into institutional anonymity - "the police," not a specific person, becomes the subject of blame and institutions can absorb blame indefinitely without any single career being affected.

Compare that to what identification does: if the senior official seen slapping a bystander is actually named, investigated and held to a specific outcome, every officer at every future protest knows that a phone camera is not just documenting "police conduct" in the abstract - it is documenting them, specifically, with consequences that attach to their name.

Where This Gets Harder

The honest complication is that identification is genuinely difficult when personnel are in plain clothes, when video quality is poor or when uniforms lack visible identification - precisely the conditions described in several of these clips.

It would be dishonest to pretend identification is simply a matter of political will. But that difficulty is itself the policy failure worth naming: uniformed personnel should be required to display visible, individual identification at all times during crowd control, precisely because anonymity is what makes accountability structurally impossible after the fact.

The videos exist. What's missing is the institutional requirement that would have made the people in them identifiable in the first place.

What Should Happen Now The Supreme

Court hearing complaints on this matter has an opportunity to do more than record outrage - it can require a genuine identification-and-investigation process, not a generic inquiry that concludes months later with an unattributed institutional apology. That is the difference between accountability and its performance and it is the standard this episode should be judged against.