A note on method
What this archive is, and what it will never be
The Unbadged has been described, in places, as a database of individual police officers built from photographs. It is not. This page sets out how the record is actually built, the rules that cannot be turned off, and where the accountability it seeks actually points.
This archive does
- Preserve the public record of 20 July 2026. Footage, photographs, and reporting that is already public, saved before it can be deleted, with its sources attached.
- Fingerprint every file on arrival. Each submitted original is sealed untouched in a write-once vault, so a court can trust that nothing was altered.
- Label every public claim. Everything published carries a status: claimed rests on a single source, corroborated on two or more independent ones. Nothing is stated beyond its evidence.
- Hand evidence only to the law. Legal aid, the courts, the NHRC, or established rights organizations, if and when proceedings begin. No one else.
This archive will never
- Use facial recognition. No biometric matching, no face-search, of any kind, on any tier, ever. No one is identified from their face. This is a founding rule of the project, not a setting.
- Publish submitted material. Nothing sent here appears on this site or anywhere else, in any form, not even blurred.
- Name any individual as guilty. Guilt is for a court to decide. This record preserves evidence; it does not pass sentence.
- Log an IP address. On any channel. The logs are not deleted after the fact; they are never written at all.
How personnel are identified
Only through what the footage itself shows
Where the record refers to personnel at all, it does so only through markers visible in the frame, or through the testimony of witnesses who were present and can be corroborated. If none of those exist, the record says so and stops there. It never reaches for a face. That is the entire point of the name: on 20 July the markers were removed, and a public record should be able to say who ordered that without ever needing recognition software.
Where the accountability points
Up the chain, not down it
Name plates do not fall off. They come off on an order, and an order is a decision taken above the street. The question this archive preserves evidence for is not who swung which lathi. It is who decided that a force sent to meet a students' march would go with its names already removed, and who signed off on that decision up the chain of command. Individual constables did not design that morning. A system did, and systems can be made to answer.
Verify it yourself
None of this asks for your trust
The code that runs this site is open for anyone to read. You can confirm every rule on this page against it: no recognition software of any kind, no analytics on the submission page, no IP logging anywhere, originals sealed on arrival and never touched again.
Statement
On 20 July 2026, students marching peacefully for the repair of a broken examination system were met in central Delhi with tear gas, lathis, and mass detention, by personnel whose name plates had been removed. In the days since, footage has been deleted, accounts have been locked, and the internet was cut. The courts have so far declined to watch what happened.
The Unbadged was built in that gap: to preserve the record before it disappears, and to hold it in a form that can stand in court.
Preserving evidence of how the state used force is lawful, ordinary documentation, and it is in the public interest. This archive names no one as guilty, uses no facial recognition, and publishes nothing sent to it in confidence. It asks the one question the law already asks:
When the name plates come off before a crowd is charged, who gave that order?
The people who sent this footage did so at real risk, and that trust will be kept. The record will remain. It is mirrored, it is open, and it does not depend on any one person or any one machine.