The Anatomy of a Fragile Law and Order System

For months, Bangladesh has been hearing two parallel stories about law and order. One comes from podiums, Police Week ceremonies, ministry briefings, and official statements assuring citizens that the situation has improved significantly. The other emerges from roadside tea stalls, terrified factory owners, social media feeds filled with videos of highway robberies, and the ordinary commuter calculating whether returning home after dark is still worth the risk. Between these two realities lies the true condition of Bangladesh today, where the state is not entirely absent, yet not fully present either.
The most dangerous crises in a country are not always those where institutions collapse overnight. Sometimes the more frightening condition is partial functionality. A police force that works selectively can create greater uncertainty than one that has completely disappeared. Bangladesh currently appears trapped in this uncomfortable middle ground. The government insists the police have recovered from the chaos that followed the political transition after August 2024. The police insist intelligence surveillance has increased, operations are underway, and criminals are being arrested daily. Statistics are presented as evidence of progress. Yet the public continues to encounter extortion, mob violence, organised crime, and visible insecurity with alarming regularity.
This contradiction is not merely about crime rates. It is about confidence. A society can tolerate many hardships if people believe the state remains capable of protecting them eventually. Once that belief begins to weaken, every robbery feels larger than the incident itself. Every murder becomes symbolic. Every video of armed youths stopping vehicles on highways transforms into a psychological referendum on state authority.
Bangladesh has entered an era where perception itself has become a security challenge. The most revealing aspect of the current situation is not that crimes are occurring. Crimes occur everywhere. What is more alarming is the repeated suggestion that political identities continue to influence enforcement. When police officers themselves privately admit that action becomes difficult if allegations involve individuals connected to ruling circles, the issue ceases to be criminality alone. It becomes a structural weakness. Extortion, then, no longer operates as isolated criminal activity. It evolves into an informal taxation system enforced through fear, political patronage, and negotiated immunity.
Historically, Bangladesh has never lacked criminals. What has changed over different political periods is the relationship between criminals and power. In fragile democracies, criminal networks rarely survive independently. They survive because they become useful. Muscle power during elections, territorial control over transport hubs, influence over labour groups, dominance in local economies, and access to illicit financial streams create incentives for political protection. Eventually, the line separating political actor and criminal entrepreneur becomes impossible to identify clearly.
The issue of looted police weapons illustrates this crisis with disturbing clarity. More than a thousand firearms and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition remain unrecovered long after the political upheaval that triggered attacks on police stations. This is not merely an administrative failure. It represents a long-term national security threat. Guns do not vanish into thin air. They circulate. They are rented, traded, hidden, sold, inherited, and reused. Every unrecovered firearm becomes a future possibility of violence waiting silently inside the system.
Bangladesh is therefore confronting a layered crisis. There is the visible crime that appears in newspapers daily. Beneath it exists a deeper erosion of deterrence. Criminals become bolder not only when police capacity weakens but also when they sense hesitation within the state. Fear of political complications, institutional confusion after transitions of power, and declining public trust collectively produce an atmosphere where opportunistic violence flourishes.
The rise in mob violence is also part of this same ecosystem. Mob justice rarely grows because citizens suddenly become barbaric. It grows when formal justice appears uncertain, delayed, compromised, or inaccessible. When people lose confidence that institutions will act decisively, crowds begin manufacturing instant verdicts themselves. Mob violence is therefore not separate from institutional weakness. It is one of its clearest symptoms.
Yet, there is another uncomfortable truth Bangladesh must confront. Citizens themselves often demand contradictory things from law enforcement. The public wants aggressive policing against opponents, but restrained policing against allies. Political parties condemn extortion when outside power and then frequently absorb local strongmen once in power. Society celebrates shortcuts, glorifies influence, and tolerates selective justice until insecurity eventually reaches middle-class neighbourhoods and business districts. By then the culture that normalises impunity has already matured.
This is why simply increasing police numbers or conducting arrest drives will not solve the problem permanently. Bangladesh does not merely need more policing. It needs depoliticised policing. The distinction matters enormously. An efficient force that remains politically vulnerable can still become ineffective during moments of national stress. Real institutional strength emerges when officers believe the law protects their professionalism more than political loyalty does.
The irony is that Bangladesh simultaneously possesses both institutional experience and institutional fragility. The country has handled insurgencies, extremist violence, political unrest, and major security operations before. Its law enforcement agencies are not inexperienced. But repeated political transitions have prevented durable reform. Each administration inherits institutions shaped by previous loyalties, then reshapes them again for immediate survival. The result resembles rebuilding a bridge every few years while traffic continues flowing across it.
The consequences extend far beyond crime statistics. Investors observe insecurity carefully. Factories facing extortion reduce expansion plans. Citizens alter routines. Urban anxiety deepens. Public discourse becomes increasingly cynical. Eventually people stop asking whether conditions are improving and begin asking whether improvement is even possible.
That may be the greatest danger facing Bangladesh now. A nation does not decay only when crime increases. It decays when hopelessness becomes normalised.
The state still has time to reverse this trajectory. But recovery requires honesty before optimism. Public trust cannot be rebuilt through ceremonial declarations alone. Citizens must visibly experience equal enforcement, faster justice, professional investigations, and political restraint from those in power. Otherwise, every official assurance of stability will collide with another viral video from a highway, another extortion allegation, another grieving family, and another reminder that fear spreads faster than government statements.
Perhaps the most telling image of contemporary Bangladesh is not the armed robber on a highway or the politician promising reform at a conference hall. It is the ordinary citizen recording crimes on a mobile phone while remaining physically distant from the scene. That distance captures the national mood perfectly. People are watching their institutions cautiously, documenting events, and sharing outrage but hesitating to intervene because they are uncertain who truly controls the streets anymore. Fear has become observational rather than participatory.
The tragedy is that Bangladesh has already paid enormous historical costs for institutional collapse, political violence, and cycles of revenge. The country understands better than most nations that insecurity never remains confined to criminals alone. Once law loses consistency, commerce suffers, education suffers, democratic culture suffers, and eventually politics itself becomes hostage to the same forces it once tried to manipulate. Restoring order, therefore, is not simply about suppressing crime. It is about rebuilding the moral credibility of the republic before citizens permanently adapt themselves to insecurity as a normal condition of national life.
If that adaptation hardens into habit, Bangladesh may discover late that societies do not collapse only through revolutions. Sometimes they erode through exhaustion, accommodation, silence, and the privatisation of fear.
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The writer is an academic, journalist and political analyst, currently teaching at IUBAT. He can be reached at [email protected]