Over three years in the making, this two-part series offered unique and unseen access to the infamous Delhi Police. As lead director, I was the first on the ground and split my filming time between the busiest police station in Delhi, which became the focus of film one, and the most dangerous station, the subject of film two. The capital is India’s most violent city, and with crime at its highest ever recorded level this series looked at how just 85,000 police manage a city of 18 million people who generate 4,000 reported crimes a week.

Directing stories across both programmes, I edited episode two in the series which is set in the notorious northern neighborhood of Mangolpuri. It has a population of 600,000, but is overseen by just one police car and 175 officers. I spent ten weeks embedded alone with an Indian sound recordist and a producer. On my first day at the station I filmed a victim’s angry family and neighbors arriving at the station to complain about what they saw as negligence by the police. The situation quickly escalated into a terrifying riot. We also filmed the festival of Holi when police struggled to cope with the scale of drunk revelers.