This article makes the case for political scientists to acknowledge the impact of police violence on citizenship and rights using the enforcement of pandemic restrictions from India as well as other countries as illustrations. With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, exceptional powers granted under health-related emergencies allowed for extensive police violence around the world. Rather than exceptional, we note, police violence under the pandemic added one more deadly layer to the routine experience of what we call ‘violent exclusions from citizenship’. While scholars have looked at spectacular cases of police violence and at the particularities of experience of citizenship separately, they have not looked at the crucial role of police power in determining citizenship. Our main intervention is thus to acknowledge the police as a site of state power and police’s discretionary role in determining whether a person will be recognised in their dignity and accorded rights.
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