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How Policing and Organized Crime Converge and Where They Split

Aug 2026

Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing more and more instances of police violence, brutality and abuse of power. It always begged the question, if this is the police, who are the criminals? That then led to a lot of questions for me but I would eventually forget them and move on. One deep dive session powered by ADHD and LLMs with deep research mode led to a series of questions and answers, which I’m documenting here for posterity, because why should I suffer alone? If you are someone that enjoys learning things just for the sake of it, you are my people, enjoy the dive. If you aren’t interested in this, I’ll add a TLDR at the end, cheers to you and the 10 minutes you just saved.

*There was no AI used in the writing of the below work of biblical proportions, but there was a lot of AI used to gather the information needed, because that’s what AI is supposed to do. I also consumed a lot of water after this.

The Observation at the Beginning

When you start to think about the police as perpetrators of crime, you begin to draw a lot of parallels between the structures of organized crime and the police. If you dig around a bit about the origin of organized crime around the world, you’ll encounter a lot of stories, I’ll just drop them here succinctly for now.

The OG reference for mafia, The Godfather, was an Italian man from Sicily, so it’s only right to start there. The Sicilian Mafia was initially just a group of men who guarded the lemon groves, which were a high value crop in the region. After the collapse of feudalism in Italy, a prime target were the lemon groves due to their high profit margin, which created a vacuum for private security. Private guards evolved into local clans of brotherhoods with blood oaths, clan bosses, defended territory and a code of silence called omertà.
In Japan, peddlers at festivals (tekiya) and illegal gamblers (bakuto) formed what is now called the Yakuza. They adopted a family style hierarchy with a boss/father figure at the top and a father-child relationship between every boss and their subordinates. Ritualistic finger-cutting for failure, and an expectation of loyalty down to the lowest rungs reinforced by the fear of death were common knowledge. In Southern China, patriotic secret societies that were formed to overthrow the ruler that time, evolved over centuries to form the gang we see in a lot of early 2000s movies known as the Triads. They’re known to have a strict ranking system, ritual initiation ceremonies and blood oaths to ensure absolute loyalty and secrecy. In post-Soviet Russia, ex-athletes and ex-KGB men built “protection firms” that taxed, guarded and enforced.

Now to come home to India. In Mumbai, during a time of post-indipendence prohibition (Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949) and import restrictions, dock workers, smugglers and bootleggers began catering to a lucrative black market demand. Out of the tussle of illegal commerce rose a trinity of dons. Haji Mastan, Karim Lala and Varadarajan Mudaliar (or as the real ones know him, Velu Nayakar from Naayakan, a Kamal Haasan masterpiece). All their teams had a hierarchy of members, with all three heads conducting weekly parallel courts/darbars to hand out informal justice to the poor. All three gangs had agreed on non-overlapping territories, a cartel arrangement to avoid conflict.

If you’re like me, you would already notice that all these gangs were formed in different centuries, have different religions, different languages and no shared “How to be a gangsta” manual. And yet we see a hierarchy, a code of silence, enforced loyalty, bloody rituals, protection payments and in-house brands of justice. The obvious yet unsettling part is, you can run the same exercise on police forces all over the world and you’ll find the same animal wearing a different coat. A platypus vs Perry the Platypus type revelation, I’m aware. A paramilitary rank structure, jurisdictions/turfs, a code of silence enforced internally, fraternal loyalty, and if we’re being candidly realistic, weekly protection payments, commission cuts and civilians getting killed.
This led to a series of questions, and I will now be dragging you by the arm through all of them. The fallacy o’ sunk cost hath command you, keep going.

Is this pattern really there everywhere or am I reaching?

I checked, it is real. I told Claude “make no mistakes”, so it’s legit. Trust me bro.
So how? Biology gives us the answer, young padawan. It’s called Convergent Evolution.
If you look in the ocean, Sharks are fish, Dolphins are mammals and Ichthyosaurs (I’ll add a picture bro, even I didn’t know wtf that is, it’s not in any of the Jurassic World movies) were reptiles. These three have completely different lineages, separated by millions of years and yet somehow all of them have nearly the same body; torpedo shaped, dorsal fin, flippers and a streamlined tail. They didn’t evolve FROM each other coz it was chronologically impossible, they existed in different timelines, but they have the same design because water only permits so many shapes for fast-moving predators. The constraints forced the design, and they all arrived at the same solution.

An ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile
Not from Jurassic World.

Organized crime groups, police forces and even states are the social version of this. They likely all are doing the same job under the same constraints, and that job permits only a few workable shapes. The job is essentially to control over a piece of territory with the possibility to perform violence, operate at least partly outside or above the law, and enforce your “arrangements” without having to take anyone to court. To do this, whether you’re a criminal or the police, you need to sort out a few things.

Four problems, four recurring solutions. Stack them together and the same organization re-appears. The problem is a global one and these are the only solutions we could all come up with.

What then are the constraints that are creating these solutions?

Both police and organized crime tend to arise from the same social vacuum: A place that generates wealth, trade and disputes faster than any authority can provide order, protection and enforcement. It’s this supply and demand gap that both organizations step in and offer protection. The gangs offer to protect them from other gangs and the police offer to protect them from all gangs.
In Sicily, feudalism collapsed, land changed hands, lemon trade boomed and neither the old kingdom nor the new state could provide protection. Armed strong men, often the very people who posed the threat, would become the protectors. For a price. In Mumbai, the state couldn’t police the black markets. The dons filled the gap, to the extent that Vardha Bhai literally ran a parallel court of his own as the poor trusted it more than the real one.

Now, onto the police. Modern police was often born the same way. In England, “thief-takers” were paid per recovered item and per captured felon. A dude named Jonathan Wild somehow simultaneously ran London’s biggest gang of thieves AND made himself the city’s Thief-Take General, recovering items his own men had stolen. Bro was Robbin’ Good.
In American cities, the police were acting as the muscle of politicians (sounds too familiar), and the Lexow investigation of the 1890s even found them to be running a systematic extortion racket on the public. The remnants of that police force are what formed the next police force. In colonial India, the British built the police specifically to be a coercive instrument to control their subjects. It was modeled after their armed paramilitary in Ireland that they used as an armed, centralized paramilitary body meant to suppress political dissent and secure a hostile population. That founding design echoed in every subsequent wave of policing.

This is why the boundary blurs when you look at it slightly cross-eyed. If a police force is structurally a territorial monopoly of protection enforced by the possibility of violence, then it is already dangerously close to turning into a protection racket. (Sort of like Spotify bothering you by playing its own ads asking you to pay them to stop playing their own ads. I can understand other company’s ads, but your own? C’mon man.)

If they’re structurally the same, and born from the same vacuum, how are they different?

Oh they’re majorly different! Even though both organizations converge on the same shape, the difference cannot be structural. It has to be something layered on top of the identical skeleton that makes the difference. It’s why John Cena and I share a similar skeleton, but you can only see one of us.

There are four clear differences, and it’s important that I separate them, because people I talk to about this often boil it down to the fact that the police are legally legit, but I feel that makes us lose the actual sociological content.

  1. Direction of Accountability: this is the main difference. The deepest one too. Both organizations try to hold a monopoly of control over a territory. But the question is whether anyone above or outside the organization can reverse their decision. The police sit inside a web of entities that can overrule it. The courts, elections, the press, a right to appeal, and in many countries body cameras that are played in court. A mafia answers to no one except to maybe a stronger mafia. That’s the difference between a power you can LIVE under and a power you must SUBMIT to. This external wiring is what separates the two. If this wiring is cut, the police also reduce to another gang.
  2. The Source of the Mandate: consent vs capture. The difference in the two words is what separates the two organizations. A gangster’s authority is seized. Nobody chose him. He took his territory and dares you to challenge it. A legitimate police authority is, at least on paper, granted. It’s delegated by the governed and revocable. Not that that makes them any nicer, but at least in most cases, the population have a sense that they have authorized the police to have that power, they have consented to it.
  3. The relationship between Threat and Protection: this is the sharpest test. A racketeer is someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction (Damn Spotify ads I tell you), so think about anyone providing you protection from this angle. Would the danger exist if they didn’t? A mafia’s protection would often fail this test, as it usually protects you from itself and from rivals it provoked. A legitimate police force is supposed to protect you from dangers it did not manufacture. The moment the police start to create the threat that they charge to protect you from, they’ve by literal definition crossed the line.
  4. Universality of the Protection: a legitimate police force owes protection to you as a right, regardless of whether you pay them or if you pay taxes. Protection from the mafia needs to be purchased or curry favour with. One considers it a right, another considers it a transaction. You can also watch a police force degrade into a racket when you have to start paying bribes for them to do their duty.

These four differences are the differences in the meat that is on top of the two similar skeletons. They are not different in what they are, but they are different in what constrains them. A police force can easily look like a gang if these 4 constraints are stripped off. A gang will look like a police force if they had the same constraints.

Is it a chicken and egg question then? Who came first? Who caused whom?

This is another obvious question that arose, because we’ve all heard both sides of the story. A police officer rising to the occasion to get rid of criminals, or a gangster facing the cruelty of corrupt cops and retaliating. Did the existence of criminal behaviour prompt a police force or did a corrupt system that used the police prompt a criminal gang to oppose it? Based on what I can see, neither caused the other. They co-emerged and only then began taking effect on each other. But that’s a very anti-climactic answer. Most people will give you one of these three answers usually, based on their experience.

  1. Criminals ruled the land and the police were the response. This is a cowboy style theory that police favourists like to say and fantasize about. But this isn’t true. Any time a society acquires enough commerce, property and strangers, the existing order of society automatically creates criminals and police parallely.
  2. The police wreaked injustice on behalf of the system, criminals arose to fight back. This Robin Hood story unfortunately has supporting cases. The “baghi” of Chambal framed themselves as caste justice against a state that offered the poor nothing. There are a lot of stories of such social banditry from all around the world. But it is also known that oftentimes social bandits end up praying on the very poor they claimed to defend once they had control over a region.
  3. The police came first and manufactured criminals. This one you hear rarely, but it also is unfortunately true. The perfect example is the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 in India branding people of specific indigenous communities as “born criminals”, causing innocent people of that community to also inevitably take a path of crime.

So the causation usually runs in these three directions, but if you see on a global scale in history, all three have a small percentage of occurrences. Both organizations co-originate because of the same underlying condition, like we saw earlier, convergent evolution. A protection vacuum plus a monopoly of controlling authority worth capturing existed somewhere. Both of these organizations come in to fill this void. And then the loop closes. Once they both exist, a constant loop begins where they are both causing each other in a fight for control. It feels circular because it genuinely is.

Thus a feedback spiral is created. If you look at it now, you can’t clearly say who caused whom.

Is it really okay for a few bad apples to exist in the police?

Nope. Most people seem to be using the phrase “bad apples” to minimize police crimes. They make it sound like “oh it’s just a few bad apples, don’t judge the whole bunch, most cops are good”. But the usage of the term bad apple in itself opposes that. The proverb that it comes from is “one bad apple spoils the barrel”, which is literally true. Rotting apples emit ethylene gas, which causes other apples to ripen and rot quickly.

The metaphor was a warning about contagion; unchecked wrongdoing in a group corrupts the whole group. Criminologists studying police misconduct have been trying to restore the phrase to its original meaning, and their empirical work backs the darker story. Studies of misconduct don’t find lone wolves scattered at random. They find groups or clusters of officers who offend together or enable offences, shielded by a surrounding culture they create and a code of silence. This is why we’re all scared when any police stop us for random checking (or why women say “All men”). In a body with a system supporting silence and having a monopoly on force, a “few bad apples” can spoil the entire barrel because the barrel is built to protect them.

Where this thread leads for now

This thread of questions shows us that the resemblance between police and organized crime is real, global and a product of convergent evolution. Both are children of the same vacuum and they seem to escalate each other in a loop, so we realise the origin isn’t the problem. We also see that the shared structure is why a few bad apples in either organization can rot the entire barrel, and that people’s fear of the whole police department isn’t a bias but a correct reading of the current state of the barrel.

The thing that separates the two is the constraints placed on each structure; accountability, consent, honesty and protection as a right. But the uncomfortable truth this shows me is that the constraints which are placed on the police structure, by external entities like politics, courts and the free press aren’t doing a good job globally, which is why we’re seeing a degradation of the police globally. This was discussed in 1993 itself, when the Government of India set up The Vohra Committee to study the criminalization of politics and to investigate the nexus between criminal organizations, politicians and bureaucrats in the aftermath of the 1993 Bombay blasts. The committee found that criminal networks were operating like a parallel government with muscle and money power, and that many political leaders provided protection to criminal gangs. State officials and police officials were also found to be actively collaborating with underworld figures for personal gains. Everything we saw so far seems to be validated. The two organizations seem to be feeding each other’s degradation, with the external wirings that were supposed to hold the police accountable also deteriorating.

The Vohra report recommended the creation of a nodal agency to monitor this type of criminal-politician-beuraucrat nexus and to perform a systemic overhaul. I was surprised (not) that the Nodal Cell was left quietly until public pressure made it an item in the Parliament in 1995, after which they set up the Nodal Agency. Then in 1997, a case called Dinesh Trivedi v. Union of India reviewed the whole thing and found that no follow-up action was taken in over two years and concluded that the Agency failed to deliver a systemic overhaul, and asked for something stronger to be setup, which also led to nowhere. Clearly the same pervasive issues we see today have been happening since then, and the failure is not just in the police, but in the deterioration of the external forces that are supposed to keep it in check.

TLDR

Police and organized crime, same same but diffalent. Google ichthyosaurs and convergent evolution, same origin story for these two organizations’ structures. Who among the two came first? Neither, they’re both celibate. They spend eternity escalating and corrupting each other, like your parents. Maybe that’s why parents play good cop-bad cop. Interesting. Police is supposed to be better because of accountability to courts, consent of the people, free press, etc, but all that stuff is deteriorating rn. The Vohra Report mentions this stuff, and one bad apple can rot the entire barrel. Do with that information what you will. If you wanna know more, just save the link, say you’ll read it later and forget about it like the rest of us. Cheers.

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