A day after a parliamentary working committee began dissecting the substance of Indonesia's draft Police Bill, the presidential palace settled on a single phrase to frame the entire legislative project: "people's police." On Saturday, June 6, 2026, State Secretary Prasetyo Hadi insisted the government's focus was to make the National Police (Polri) a guardian and protector of the public. It was a reassuring message. But the gentle wording did not answer the hardest question hanging over the police law revision from the start: whether the changes add brakes to oversight of the police, or simply more horsepower.
A slogan dropped right on cue
Prasetyo's statement was no accident. It came precisely as deliberations entered the stage that will most decide the bill's fate. The government has submitted 112 points in its List of Problem Inventory (DIM) — the formal itemized response to a draft law — to the House of Representatives' Commission III, and the police bill working committee began reviewing them alongside the government on June 4, 2026. Earlier, in a May 20, 2026 plenary session, the House approved the bill as its own initiative.
"There are a few [areas of government attention]. Above all, how the institution of Polri must become a people's police, a police force that protects the people," Prasetyo said. He added that the heart of it lies in the substance, "how to strengthen Polri as an institution to carry out its duties and functions as a guardian of society, as a protector of society."
The words "guardian" and "protector" are hardly breakthroughs; both already sit at the core of Law No. 2 of 2002, in force for more than two decades. What is new is not the goal but the claim that this revision is the one that will deliver it. That is where the gap between branding and substance begins to show: a law is not measured by the adjectives officials use to sell it, but by the clauses that decide who watches whom.
Oversight is in the recommendations — the question is whether it survives
Tellingly, the push for oversight comes from the very document that gave rise to this revision. The Commission for Accelerating Police Reform (KPRP), chaired by Jimly Asshiddiqie, handed its recommendations to President Prabowo Subianto on May 5, 2026. "We reported a total of 10 volumes, covering the whole of the policy reform," Jimly said. The roughly 3,000-page document contains six main points, and an oversight agenda is among them.
The KPRP's recommendations include keeping Polri under the president, strengthening the National Police Commission (Kompolnas) as an independent body, regulating the appointment of the national police chief with the House's approval, limiting the assignment of police officers to posts outside the police structure, pushing institutional reform through to digital transformation, and revising Law No. 2 of 2002 along with its implementing rules. The proposed strengthening of Kompolnas even extends to the idea that the body could issue binding decisions for the police chief to act on. The entire reform process is targeted to run through 2029.
This is where the real tension lies, and it cannot be read from a single source. The official agenda — through both the palace's statements and the KPRP's recommendations — emphasizes oversight. Yet the criticism that has long dogged efforts to revise the police law points the other way: in legislative practice, authority tends to grow faster than the controls over it. The two are not automatically in conflict, but both can only be tested in the same place, the body of the bill that emerges from the working committee. The idea of a Kompolnas with binding powers, for instance, is easy to state in a 10-volume set of recommendations, and far harder to keep intact through clause-by-clause bargaining in parliament.
The 'superbody' shadow from an earlier wave
The anxiety over this revision has a track record. In 2024, an attempt to revise Law No. 2 of 2002 triggered broad opposition from a coalition of dozens of civil society organizations, including the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI), Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS), Amnesty International Indonesia, the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), and SAFEnet. They argued that the draft at the time expanded police powers — in cyberspace and enforcement, among other areas — without a matching strengthening of oversight.
In its position statement, the Civil Society Coalition for Police Reform said the bill "only makes Polri all the more an institution greedy for authority and positions it as ever more of a superbody." It should be stressed that this statement came from the 2024 wave of opposition, not a specific response to the 2026 draft. So far there has been no official coalition assessment of the contents of the current 112 DIM points. This historical stance is relevant for understanding where public suspicion comes from, but it cannot be treated as a verdict on a document that only began deliberation this week.
That is precisely why the stakes are concrete for ordinary citizens. Polri is the law enforcement institution that touches daily life most widely. If powers in cyberspace are genuinely broadened without firm limits, social media users, journalists, and activists are the first to feel the consequences. Conversely, if a meaningfully empowered Kompolnas does make it into the law, it could become the most significant milestone in police oversight since the 1998 Reformasi. Both scenarios start from the same text being debated today.
Civilians inside Polri, a question left unanswered
Another dimension emerged from a proposal by Human Rights Minister Natalius Pigai on June 5–6, 2026. He suggested that certain posts not directly tied to core policing duties — such as administration, finance, the inspectorate, or personnel — could be filled by civilians. The proposal touches a long-running debate over the openness of the police's bureaucratic culture.
The palace's response was deliberately left open-ended. "Well, as a proposal, I think anyone can put forward a proposal, can't they," Prasetyo said, without endorsing or rejecting it. That posture of welcoming without committing is itself a signal: the idea of opening up civilian posts remains far upstream, still discourse that may never become a clause. How the proposal is handled in formal deliberations could serve as a simple marker of how seriously the "people's police" promise is translated into structure rather than merely delivered in speeches.
What will decide it, and what is worth guarding
Several things will determine whether this revision tilts toward oversight or toward authority. First, the content of the key clauses among the 112 DIM points, especially those concerning cyberspace, wiretapping, and Polri's relationship with investigators outside the police structure. Second, whether the KPRP's proposal for a Kompolnas with binding powers actually makes it into the body of the law or evaporates in the working committee. Third, the latest stance of civil society organizations on the 2026 draft, which would balance the government's narrative — and that requires statements actually issued in 2026, not recycled protests from years past.
The pace of deliberation also bears watching. A bill that races ahead amid a crowded parliamentary agenda often raises questions about whether there is meaningful room for public participation. For a law governing an institution as large as Polri, speed without openness tends to breed fresh suspicion rather than trust. In the end, the phrase "people's police" will be tested by the one thing no slogan can stand in for: the wording of the clauses that are passed, and who is given the power to guard them.
