The Punjab Police was organised under the Police Act of 1861 on a model designed in Punjab itself and then applied across British India, an armed, centrally controlled force under the district officer.
Its training academy is in Ranjit Singh Ji's fort at Phillaur.
During the 1980s and 1990s the force was expanded enormously and given the primary counter-insurgency role. Human rights organisations have documented large numbers of disappearances, extrajudicial killings and mass cremations of unidentified bodies in that period, particularly in Amritsar district.
The National Human Rights Commission proceedings arising from the Punjab cremations case ran from December 1996 to April 2012, and produced compensation in a limited number of cases and no criminal accountability in most.
The force ended the insurgency. What it did in doing so has never been examined in any comprehensive public process, and both of those statements are part of the same history.
The academy at Phillaur is in a fort built in the Sikh period on the Sutlej, and the forensic laboratory attached to it is among the oldest in India.
The force's strength was roughly doubled in the 1980s and 1990s and a generation of officers was recruited and promoted inside that period. The institutional consequences of that expansion are still working through.
The cremations case, brought on evidence gathered by Jaswant Singh Khalra, concerned bodies recorded as unidentified and cremated by the police in Amritsar district. The proceedings ran for years and very few cases have reached conviction.