A person can be presumed innocent in a courtroom and condemned by thousands on a smartphone screen before the first hearing begins.
In Bangladesh, videos of police raids increasingly expose detained women, men, and even children to public scrutiny, often revealing their faces and personal circumstances before the allegations against them have been established.
What makes this practice particularly troubling is not merely the invasion of privacy, but the transformation of state authority into a source of public humiliation.
When law enforcement agencies facilitate such exposure and media outlets reproduce it without sufficient scrutiny, the distinction between investigating a crime and staging a spectacle begins to disappear.
The recent incident in Purbachal, where 85 people were detained during a raid and reportedly pressured to uncover their faces before cameras, illustrates the problem.
Similar footage from establishments in Gulshan and Uttara has circulated online, inviting audiences to speculate about the identities, occupations, and private lives of those detained.
Yet the central question is not whether the public should know about suspected wrongdoing. It is whether exposing the faces and personal circumstances of people who have not been convicted contributes anything meaningful to public understanding of the alleged offense.
This question matters because public humiliation is not an incidental consequence of these videos. It has become part of their appeal.
A raid offers the drama of sudden discovery, a group of detainees supplies the visual material, and a camera turns the encounter into content.
The audience is invited to feel that it has witnessed wrongdoing being punished, even when no court has determined that an offense occurred.
In this arrangement, suspicion becomes a form of guilt, exposure becomes a substitute for accountability, and humiliation acquires the appearance of justice.
The underlying danger is that punishment begins to precede the judicial process. A criminal investigation is supposed to establish facts, test evidence, and identify responsibility through lawful procedures. Publicly displaying detainees, by contrast, can impose a social penalty before those procedures have run their course.
A person may eventually be released, acquitted, or found to have had no involvement in the alleged offense, but the digital record remains. Images can be copied, reposted, downloaded, and detached from their original context. A subsequent correction rarely travels as far as the original accusation.
For women, the consequences can be particularly severe. Exposure may invite moral judgment, harassment, and reputational damage that extend to their families and professional lives.
In a society where women's conduct is frequently subjected to disproportionate scrutiny, the publication of footage from a police raid can function as an instrument of social punishment, regardless of the legal merits of the case.
Their identities become the story, while the evidence, the circumstances of the raid, and the conduct of the authorities receive comparatively less attention.
The result is a disturbing inversion of accountability: The people whose alleged conduct requires investigation become publicly identifiable, while the decisions of those exercising state power may remain largely unexamined.
Men are not immune to this practice. Videos of searches, phone inspections, and interrogations can expose private communications, personal associations, and intimate details to strangers.
Children face an even more alarming risk. The circulation of a schoolgirl's video following allegations about her private life demonstrates how quickly a moment of vulnerability can become a permanent public record.
Bangladesh's Children Act restricts the publication of information that may identify a child in circumstances covered by its provisions. Yet the existence of a legal prohibition does not automatically protect children when digital audiences reward exposure and those responsible for sharing the footage fail to consider its consequences.
Understanding protections
The Constitution of Bangladesh provides important protections relevant to this debate. Article 31 concerns protection of the law and treatment in accordance with law, while Article 35 includes safeguards against compelled self-incrimination and torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also recognizes the presumption of innocence and protection against arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, and reputation.
These principles are not suspended because someone has been detained or because a video attracts considerable attention. Nor does the public's curiosity automatically establish a public interest in revealing a person's identity.
The distinction between public interest and public curiosity deserves particular emphasis. Reporting that authorities have conducted a raid, detained individuals, or uncovered evidence of suspected wrongdoing may serve a legitimate public purpose.
Yet, identifying the people involved, broadcasting their faces, or displaying their distress requires a separate justification. Their identities may be relevant in some cases, particularly when authorities are seeking public assistance or when identification is necessary to understand a matter of genuine public importance.
But such exceptions should not become routine practice. The question should always be whether disclosure is necessary, proportionate, and supported by a clear public interest, rather than whether it is likely to generate attention.
The media’s role
This is where the conduct of media organizations becomes inseparable from the problem. Journalism cannot surrender its editorial judgment merely because footage comes from an official source.
Police briefings, photographs, and videos are not neutral windows into reality; they reflect decisions about what to record, what to disclose, and how an operation should be presented.
When journalists publish such material without asking why detainees are being exposed, whether the footage is necessary, or whether its circulation could cause disproportionate harm, they risk becoming distributors of an official narrative rather than independent observers of state power.
The economic and technological incentives of digital journalism make this failure easier to understand, though not to excuse.
Faces, confrontation, and apparent scandal attract clicks and shares. A video that invites moral condemnation may travel faster than a carefully reported account of investigative procedure or legal safeguards.
As mobile journalism and live broadcasting expand, the cost of recording and distributing an encounter has fallen dramatically.
Editorial restraint, however, has not necessarily advanced at the same pace. The result is an environment in which the capacity to expose people has grown faster than the willingness to consider whether they should be exposed.
Law enforcement’s judgment
There is also a serious institutional question for law enforcement. If journalists are informed about raids in advance, accompany officers, and receive footage from official sources, clear rules are needed to establish the limits of access and disclosure.
Recording material for evidentiary purposes is not equivalent to distributing it for publicity. A video may have legitimate investigative value while being entirely unsuitable for public release.
The authority to investigate suspected crime should not be treated as an unrestricted licence to display the people under investigation. If allegations of threats to expose detainees are substantiated, they demand especially serious scrutiny because the prospect of public disgrace could become a means of coercion or extortion.
Bangladesh's courts have previously raised concerns about presenting arrested persons and suspects before the media, including judicial interventions in 2012 and 2015 and observations concerning media briefings during ongoing investigations in 2019.
The persistence of similar practices suggests that judicial concern alone cannot establish an effective culture of restraint.
Clear operational rules, enforceable accountability, and consistent editorial standards are needed to translate legal principles into everyday practice.
Any policy should distinguish legitimate public disclosure from unnecessary identification, protect children and vulnerable people, and establish consequences for unauthorized or coercive dissemination of footage.
Ultimately, the issue is larger than the privacy of individual detainees. It concerns the kind of relationship citizens are permitted to have with the institutions that exercise power over them.
When an arrest becomes an opportunity for public shaming, the state communicates that dignity is conditional and that suspicion can strip a person of ordinary protections.
When media organizations amplify that message, they help normalize a culture in which exposure is mistaken for evidence and humiliation for justice.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.