How to file a complaint against the police

The five routes are not interchangeable, and the right one depends on what happened rather than on how angry you are.

Refusal to register an FIR is the most common complaint and has its own specific remedy. Registration is mandatory where the information discloses a cognisable offence, and jurisdiction is never a lawful reason to refuse. The answer is a written complaint to the Superintendent of Police, who must investigate or direct an investigation if satisfied a cognisable offence is disclosed, and then an application to a Judicial Magistrate, who can order registration and investigation.

Custodial violence, custodial death, illegal detention and torture are the gravest category and demand the human rights route immediately and in parallel with everything else. These are the core of what human rights commissions were created for, and time matters because the evidence is medical.

Corruption — a demand for money to register a case, to release a vehicle, to drop a name from a chargesheet — engages the state anti-corruption bureau or vigilance machinery as well as the departmental route, and the evidence that matters is contemporaneous: recordings, messages, a witness to the demand.

Misconduct in the ordinary sense — abusive language, refusal to give a receipt, failure to act on a complaint, discourtesy, absence from duty — is genuinely a departmental matter and the departmental route is the proportionate one.

Failure to follow arrest procedure is a distinct category with distinct consequences. The safeguards around arrest, the obligation to inform a relative or friend, the memo of arrest, the medical examination and the production before a magistrate are laid down in the criminal procedure legislation, and a breach of them is a specific, provable allegation rather than a general grievance.

Discrimination in policing — differential treatment on grounds of caste, religion, gender or disability — engages additional bodies: the commissions for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, the women's commission, and the disability commissioners, each of which can inquire in its own domain.

Write down what happened while it is fresh, in chronological order. Date, time, place, police station, and what was said and done, in sequence. Do this before you decide where to send it, because the same document serves every forum.

Identify the officers. A name is best; a buckle number, a rank and a description with the time and location is workable. 'Some policemen at the station' is not investigable and complaints framed that way are routinely closed. If you cannot identify anyone, say precisely when and where you were, because duty rosters exist and can be checked.

Preserve the medical evidence first if there was any physical assault. Get examined at a government hospital, ask for the medico-legal case record, and photograph injuries with a timestamp. This is the single most time-critical step in the entire process and it cannot be reconstructed later. Injuries fade, and a complaint of assault with no contemporaneous medical record becomes one person's word against a department's.

Collect the documentary trail: any receipt or acknowledgement, any notice served, the arrest memo if there was an arrest, call records, CCTV from nearby premises if you can get to the owner before it is overwritten, and the names and contact details of witnesses.

Send the written complaint to the Superintendent of Police of the district, or the Deputy Commissioner in a commissionerate, by registered post or through the force's online grievance channel, and keep the receipt or the acknowledgement number. Address it to the office, not to an individual officer.

At the same time — not afterwards — file with the state human rights commission, or with the National Human Rights Commission where the state commission is not functioning or the matter crosses states. There is no fee and a complaint can be made in writing or through the commission's online facility.

Where the state has a Police Complaints Authority, file there too for serious misconduct. These bodies were established to receive exactly this category of complaint independently of the department.

If the complaint concerns a refused FIR and the SP route produces nothing, apply to the Judicial Magistrate. This is a written application and in practice needs a lawyer; free legal aid through the district legal services authority covers it.

Keep a dated log of every submission, acknowledgement, reminder and response. Where a complaint stalls, that log is what converts a follow-up into an escalation.

The National Human Rights Commission and the state commissions are constituted under the Protection of Human Rights Act 1993. Their jurisdiction covers violation of human rights, and abetment of such violation, as well as negligence in the prevention of such violation by a public servant — which is the limb that catches police inaction as well as police action.

A commission can inquire on a complaint, on a petition presented to it, or on its own motion. It has the powers of a civil court for the purposes of an inquiry: summoning witnesses, requiring the production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavit and requisitioning public records. It also has its own investigation machinery and can direct a state's investigating agency to assist.

What it produces at the end is a recommendation rather than a binding order. It can recommend payment of compensation to the victim or their family, recommend prosecution or other action against the public servant concerned, and approach the Supreme Court or a High Court for such directions as that court may consider necessary.

That distinction disappoints people, and it should be understood realistically. A recommendation from a human rights commission is not an order, but it is a formal finding on the record by a statutory body, it usually carries a recommendation of interim relief, and it is very difficult for a state government to simply ignore. It is also a powerful document to hold when going to a High Court afterwards.

Custodial deaths occupy a special position: the authorities are required to report them to the commission, and the commission's procedures around them are correspondingly rigorous. A family which believes a death in custody has not been reported should say so to the commission directly.

There are limits on how far back a commission will look, and matters already before another commission or court may be treated differently. Where a complaint concerns armed forces, the Act provides a distinct procedure.

Complaints are free and can be made in writing or through the commission's online facility. There is no requirement to be the victim — anyone may complain on a victim's behalf, which matters where the victim is in custody, injured or intimidated.

In its judgment on police reform, the Supreme Court directed the establishment of Police Complaints Authorities at state and district level to look into complaints against police officers, alongside directions on security of tenure, separation of investigation from law and order, and the establishment of state security commissions.

The purpose was structural. A complaint against a police officer investigated by the same force has an obvious credibility problem, and the Authority was designed to receive serious complaints — allegations of death, grievous hurt or rape in custody at the state level, and a wider range of misconduct at district level — independently.

Implementation has varied enormously between states, and this is the honest position: some states have functioning Authorities with published procedures, some have constituted them nominally, and in some the body is difficult to locate. Before relying on this route, check whether your state's Authority actually exists and is sitting.

Where it does exist, it is worth using, because it is the only forum specifically designed for this category of complaint, and a finding by it carries weight the departmental route cannot.

The National Human Rights Commission has itself recommended police reform measures including complaints machinery of this kind, and has established human rights cells within state police headquarters, which are a further internal channel.

None of these bodies displaces the criminal law. Where the conduct alleged is itself an offence — assault, wrongful confinement, extortion, custodial violence — an FIR against the officer is competent, and refusal to register it is subject to the same remedies as any other refusal.

It is worth being clear-eyed about the consequences of complaining. Complaints against a local station by someone who continues to live in its jurisdiction carry real risk of retaliation, and this is a reason to complain upwards and outwards — to a commission, to the Authority, to the district head — rather than at the station itself, and to make sure the complaint is on the record in more than one place.

The judicial routes do things the administrative ones cannot.

A Judicial Magistrate can order registration of an FIR and direct an investigation where the police have refused. This is the specific remedy for the most common complaint of all, and it is comparatively quick.

A High Court, in its writ jurisdiction, can direct an investigation, transfer it to another agency, quash proceedings, and award compensation for violation of fundamental rights. Compensation in custodial violence and illegal detention cases is awarded on a public law footing, independently of any civil claim, and this is a well-established jurisdiction rather than an exceptional one.

The criminal procedure legislation itself provides safeguards around arrest and detention whose breach is provable and consequential: the arrest memo, the obligation to inform a nominated person, the medical examination, and production before a magistrate within the prescribed period. When you are told an arrest was lawful, these are the specific things to check.

Where a case has already been registered against you and you believe it is malicious, the route is a petition to the High Court to quash, and that is a matter for a lawyer.

Free legal aid through the district legal services authority covers all of this for those eligible, and the eligibility categories — which include women, children, persons with disabilities, members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, victims of trafficking, persons in custody and those below an income threshold — are considerably wider than most people assume. Someone in custody is eligible as a matter of course.

Finally, keep the parallel filings alive. A commission complaint, a departmental complaint and a magistrate application about the same incident reinforce one another: the commission's inquiry may produce documents the department would not release, and a departmental finding, even an unsatisfactory one, is evidence of what the force says happened.