1 September 2026
The Essex Human Rights Centre was glad to have the chance to speak with Vineet Kapoor (MA in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights, 2005-6) and UK Chevening scholarship recipient. He is a senior police officer in the Indian Police Service, currently serving as Deputy Inspector General of Police for Community Policing for the state of Madhya Pradesh. He was recently awarded the Human Rights Hero Award during the World Human Rights Summit on Youth Education, which took place at UN Headquarters in New York.
HRC: Congratulations Vineet on your recent award! We would love to know how you became interested in policing
VK: Thank you! I get immense satisfaction when I can directly impact on the protection of rights and the creation of an environment of safety. Law enforcement and policing have a direct interface with public life. Fear and insecurity are the greatest breeding grounds of violence, exploitation and human rights violations. The police are entrusted with the responsibility to create an environment of safety and security which enables ordinary people to access justice. It also is a first responder to individuals and communities in crisis.
HRC: How has your study of human rights impacted upon your approach to policing?
VK: I was already a police officer when I came to Essex to study on the MA in in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights. I realised after joining the police that there is a deep connection between human rights protection and policing practice and this needs to be studied in detail. I was on a study leave from my job in the Indian police service, and I went back to the Indian police when I completed my studies to contribute to the mainstreaming of human rights in policing practice.
The human rights MA taught me how to see my police work and policing in general from a human rights perspective. I was able to appreciate what state accountability boils down to, how it affects both the encroachment on individual and community rights and the restoration of those rights. It helped me to better understand how the police service can deliver outcomes that make a direct contribution to state accountability.
Accountability is the most important thing I could understand through my police work after completing this degree. I could see the context of the law enforcement agency as the primary duty holder representing and working through the authority it derives from the state. It also helped me to understand the practical implications of civil and political rights and how police actions or inactions affect how human rights are enforced. It also helped me to understand economic, social and cultural rights from the perspective of police service delivery and how the interface between development and human rights can be affected by the quality of police service delivery. In particular, police services will be ineffective if insecurity, inequality and incompetence are allowed to prevail over strong governance practices. This is why development must be seen from a human security angle. There is a crucial connection between development and freedom, between human security and human development and poverty, inequality, corruption, intersectionality, gender-based and caste and class-based discrimination. The minority and vulnerability-related implications to police service delivery became clear to me as a police officer working in a democratic, developing country.
Over the two decades since my MA degree, I directed my services to improve police accountability by transforming police syllabi and police training mandates. I was instrumental in first changing the state syllabi of my native state of Madhya Pradesh to mainstream human rights and improve training and human rights pedagogy to make the training more relevant and impactful. Impressed with this achievement, I was invited by the national government to make a standardised syllabi for the civilian police for the entire country, which embedded human rights into the syllabi for all police ranks. I have also been responsible for bringing gender justice and child rights-based improvements in police practice and accountability standards through training, mentoring and monitoring approaches.
During the past five years, I have been involved in mainstreaming human rights norms into community policing. This has resulted in the incorporation of human rights, child rights, women’s rights, elderly people’s rights, cultural rights into community police-based public safety work. I have also implemented police reforms with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) enabled work, especially SDG 5 for women’s security, SDG 11 for urban safety and most importantly SDG 16 which covers peace and safe institutions where police have a crucial role to play.
HRC: What were your impressions of the work on police reforms and human rights-based policing when working with the UN?
VK: In the conflict zones where I served, I found that when the police services are no longer neutral and when political actors become partisan, life, liberty, community safety, peace and development are negatively impacted, and humanity can become dangerous to its own self. This context of lawlessness taught me the value of good governance and human rights-embedded police work and why and how I should devote my energies to mainstream human rights in police training and police public interface and in police accountability through monitoring mechanisms.
HRC: You also received a PhD in Police Training Culture and Organizational Development. Can you provide some details of the focus of your research?
VK: I realised that there is an endemic problem of human rights compliance in police practice. Through my exposure to UN peacekeeping as well as my Essex MA degree where I studied the sociological and criminological aspects of human rights, my understanding of what I had to do in my research became clearer. As a police officer myself, I could understand how police personnel think and act and how the police organizational culture promotes a particular version of police and how this culture undermines human rights as a norm. This enabled me to understand the theoretical and practical aspects of organizational cultures and subcultures in the police and draw inferences to improve police education and capacities to serve with an ethical and human rights orientation.
I studied five police training academies in five states in India, examined police training cultures and subcultures. I drew patterns of the organizational socialisation of the police in the training institutions and examined the capacities of the trainers to impart human rights education. This was done by finding gaps and then drawing inferences to improve training design, training content and training pedagogy – all of which make a crucial difference to human rights capacity building and promoting human rights as a professional value. This later helped me to improve my police training syllabi designed and the government asked me to work on drafting syllabi based on this research. The research had a field-based relevance, practice-based value as well as clear impact.
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