5 THE POLICE

Police Powers

As in many other countries, the national police of Indonesia hold a wide range of coercive powers that are crucial to incumbent presidents. One of the most essential roles in this regard is controlling demonstrations (Eggert, Wouters, Ketelaars, and Walgrave 2018). Under authoritarianism, and in the early democratic period, this function was carried out mostly by the military, but since the mid-2000s, the police have been at the forefront of defending sitting governments against protests. The military is called in to help control protests, but the police manage day-to-day activist gatherings (Suliyanto 2021). In facing such protests, the police can either take a hard-line stance and stop the demonstrations (and thus help the government in suppressing opposition to its policies), or allow public dissent to spread and undermine the administration—indeed, there have been reports of apparently police-sponsored demonstrations that related to the organization own interests.¹ Consequently, the police possess a key authority that has the potential to decide the fate of governments—managing protests effectively can secure the latter’s survival, while a passive or even encouraging attitude could mean their end. (To be sure, excessively violent repression of demonstrations by the police can harm governments, too.) Presidents are keenly aware of this sensitive role of the police and hence have a strong incentive to maintain the police’s support for the government.

The police have also increasingly assumed the authority to contain armed communal violence and unrest (Diprose and Acza 2019). The military played the leading role in fighting ethno-religious violence from 1998 to about 2003, but as the intensity of this unrest declined, the police were put in charge of managing its aftermath. In the post-2004 polity, the police are the first to mobilize in cases of small-scale community violence, with the military becoming involved only if the police prove incapable of handling it—or if there is an active armed movement, such as in Papua. Much to the dismay of the military, the police have also obtained the authority to manage terrorism cases, which has given them a reason to ask for additional funding, including international aid (Carroll 2016). Under Widodo, the military secured the president’s approval toward a greater role for the armed forces in counter-terrorism (Priamarizki 2021); however, the police’s function as the primary responder to terrorist events has remained untouched. Thus, just as the military did in the early democratic transition, the police now oversee outbreaks of unrest and terrorist incidents that could destabilize the government if not handled effectively. Police leaders unsympathetic to the incumbent government could let violent episodes in the regions spread to remove the incumbent or to extract concessions from him or her. This, in turn, creates a dependency of the president on the police that needs to be considered when making broader decisions about the architecture of presidential coalitions and the resources and concessions required to sustain them.

But the police are not only a security force; they are also a law enforcement agency. As such, they are the first layer in a multi-agency process that determines whether a citizen is charged with a crime. This power makes it possible for the police to either overlook a violation or, conversely, to build a case to entangle a citizen in legal proceedings. There are numerous examples of both patterns. In July 2021, Ardi Bakrie—the son of former Golkar chair Aburizal Bakrie, who had made a deal with the Widodo government in 2016 to leave his post—was arrested on drug charges. But while other citizens have gone to prison for minor drug offenses, Ardi was put into a “rehabilitation program” recommended by the police (Detik 2021).² Similarly, in 2013, the son of senior minister Hatta Radjasa—Yudhoyono’s brother-in-law—caused a car accident that killed two people (including a toddler) and seriously wounded three others. The police processed the case “gently,” and he was only hit with a probation sentence. At the other end of the spectrum, Rizieq Shihab—the leader of the Islamist protest movement against the Jakarta governor and the government more broadly in 2016 and 2017—was sentenced to four years in prison in June 2021, ostensibly for denying that he had tested positive for COVID-19. Of course, other citizens—including cabinet members—had kept their COVID-19 infection a secret, but in Rizieq’s case, the full force of the police was mobilized to pursue the case. Apparently, Rizieq’s return to Indonesia in December 2020 after three years in exile created anxiety in the government that he could once again become a popular extra-parliamentary opposition leader (Fealy and White 2021). His arrest and sentencing ensured that he was unable to play this role.

Of particular importance within the police’s law enforcement portfolio is the authority to handle corruption cases (Kurniawan 2021). This power gives them direct leverage over the world of politics and business. Although the creation of the KPK in 2003 shifted the responsibility for large corruption cases away from the police to the new anti-corruption agency, the police remained in charge of the bulk of the smaller cases. Over time, the police also infiltrated the KPK, and by 2019, they had succeeded in almost entirely controlling it. In the early period of the KPK, the police exerted influence over it by sending police officers to act as KPK investigators. But in 2019, a police general known for his hostility toward the KPK was elected its chairman (KPK commissioners and chairs are nominated by the president and elected by the legislature). This appointment was the culmination of a concerted effort by the political elite—which included the political parties, the president, and the police—to weaken the KPK, as it had imprisoned many of their associates. During both the Yudhoyono and early Widodo presidencies, the police had arrested KPK commissioners in retaliation whenever the latter indicted police officers (as in the Gunawan case of 2015). However, the placement of one of their own as KPK chair made such interventions unnecessary. Under Firli Bahuri (the former police chief of South Sumatra), the KPK conducted fewer operations (Yahya 2020), reducing the threat it posed to vested elite interests. With Bahuri as chair, the KPK also removed the last investigators deeply committed to the organization’s independence, turning it effectively into an extension of the police.³

Like the military, the police have a nationwide network that runs parallel to the civilian administration (see table 5.1). Compared to the armed forces, however, the police have found it easier to justify the existence of this network as its law enforcement function requires presence at all administrative levels. Indeed, far from having to defend the system, the police have seen its network expanding massively in the post-Suharto era. Police officers at all levels have taken their seats at the local leadership forum, Forkopimda, where they mingle with other government officials to discuss key political and economic matters. Hence, the police have a national organization that is stronger than that of most civilian actors, and that can be of use to the president for intelligence, communication, and political engineering purposes. For instance, when Widodo feared in 2019 that a low turnout in the presidential elections could hurt him, the police started a campaign encouraging citizens to vote. Posters featuring the police chief (in some cases, together with the military commander) proclaimed that going to the ballot box was “cool,” and local officers conveyed the message to village communities across the archipelago (Polsek Karang Bintang 2019). Partly because of this coordinated effort, voter turnout was 81 percent, 11 percent higher than in the prior presidential election of 2014, when the police had not run a similar voter mobilization campaign.

In combination, these trends of rising police power have turned the chief of police position from a marginal post under the New Order into the most sought-after domestic security job in the post-Suharto era. Whenever an active police chief approaches retirement age, parties, business actors, and other groups begin to lobby for a replacement who they think can best represent their interests. According to Luhut Pandjaitan, “the president gets a headache every time the chief of police position needs to be filled. You should see the amount of messages we receive, ‘candidate A is really great, don’t pick candidate B,’ and so forth. This happens with few other positions we have to fill” (interview, Jayapura, June 16, 2016). Correspondingly, police officers interested in becoming chief must build political coalitions long before the appointment process begins. One of the difficulties Widodo experienced in cancelling Gunawan’s 2015 nomination was the latter’s formidable political network. Not only was he Megawati’s confidant, but he had also developed close relationships with caucus leaders in the DPR, who would later be in charge of the confirmation hearings. One parliamentarian conceded that “[Gunawan] is a very clever operator. He always makes sure that he does favors to people—and if you’re high up in the police, you can do a lot of favors to a lot of important figures. These favors are then repaid in time” (confidential interview, Jakarta, November 16, 2016). In the eyes of many ordinary Indonesians, too, the position of police chief is now among the top posts in the country’s socio-political hierarchy, giving its holder high levels of name recognition. In a 2019 survey, both Gunawan and the incumbent police chief, Tito Kurniavan, had a name recognition of above 25 percent, qualifying them for consideration as presidential hopefuls (Fajri 2019).

It is important to bear in mind, therefore, that in young, defective democracies such as Indonesia, the police are neither the kind of professional, apolitical enforcer of the law that we typically associate with liberal polities, nor are they a willful instrument of executive leaders, as is often the case in autocracies. Rather, they are a politicized security agency with multiple powers and a host of institutional and ideological interests, and they are not shy in using the former to advance the pursuit of the latter. As such, the police are one of the actors with veto power potential that Indonesian presidents have to cultivate if they wish to rule without major disturbances to their day-to-day governance. As with other players, this occurs via the integration of the police into the system of coalitional presidentialism, in which the police gain representation in cabinet and other rewards that presidents can hand out to their partners. In the following section, we look at the powers that Indonesian presidents can bring to the table to discipline, appease, and reward the police and secure their active support or—at the very least—their passive tolerance.

Presidential Powers vis-à-vis the Police

The police hold a crucial position in Indonesia’s socio-political landscape, but the president has numerous instruments at his or her disposal to enforce their loyalty. As noted in other cases, and as the coalitional presidentialism literature suggests, the president’s appointment powers are essential in extracting support from key actors. In contrast to the military, which the Indonesian constitution directly subordinates to the president, the place of the police in the country’s institutional hierarchy was not determined in the post-2002 constitution. However, the police law of 2002 situated the police under the president, based on the general understanding of Indonesia’s presidential system and the similar position of the armed forces (Danendra 2012). In fact, although not constitutionally anchored, the authority of presidents over the police is more direct than their control over the military. While the armed forces have an institutional relationship with the Ministry of Defense, the police have no ministry to cooperate with, let alone report to (other than the Coordinating Ministry for Political, Legal and Security affairs, which is traditionally weak as it has fewer resources than the core departments it oversees). In 2002, and at several later junctures, there were discussions on whether the police should be placed under the Ministry of Home Affairs or a newly created police ministry. But the police resisted such a move, preferring to deal with the president directly, and presidents have also shown little interest in weakening their direct vertical oversight. Thus, in Indonesia’s current political set-up, presidents have the ultimate authority over the police.

In practice, this means that the president nominates the police chief, who is subsequently confirmed by the DPR. As noted, these nominations are highly politicized and contested, but despite the tensions surrounding them, none of the president’s nominees has been rejected by post-2004 parliaments. While this is testimony to the deals that presidents typically make with legislators to secure their nominations, it also underlines the president’s institutional power to select the personnel serving him or her. Below the police chief, all senior appointments within the police have to be consulted with the president. This gives presidents opportunities to place officers close to them in leading positions in the police. In addition to the deputy chief of police, the politically most sensitive post in the police is the head of the Criminal Investigation Agency (Bareskrim), a three-star position. The Bareskrim chief handles all major crime investigations, making him a focal point for politicians who wish to protect themselves or people close to them from potential charges. At the beginning of Widodo’s presidency, the post was held by Budi Waseso, a close ally of Budi Gunawan. As the Budi Gunawan crisis developed, Waseso created significant problems for Widodo by arresting senior KPK leaders with questionable charges (Arnaz 2015). Widodo was able to relieve Waseso of his command after less than a year in office but had to compensate him with another important post as his links to Gunawan (and thus Megawati) remained strong. Nevertheless, Widodo succeeded in using his appointment powers to put a much less controversial—and more cooperative—officer in the Bareskrim position.

Significantly, the president’s power to endorse all senior appointments in the police is a self-given right. It is neither enshrined in the constitution nor in the 2002 police law; rather, it is stipulated in a presidential act (Iskandar 2018). Article 29(1) of the Presidential Decision 70/2002 regulates that all appointments from two-star level upward require consultation with the president. In other words, this authority is rooted in a legal instrument that the president can issue without seeking approval from any other institution (such as the legislature). Embedded within the same Presidential Decision are details of the police’s internal organization, as are important privileges for its leaders—Article 31(1), for instance, regulates that the police chief receives the rank, enumeration, and facilities of a cabinet minister. This ability of presidents to decree the way the police work and which hierarchical privileges they obtain highlights another tool of coalitional presidentialism: that is, legislative authority. Not only can the president promulgate laws (together with the DPR) that govern the internal rules of the police, but—similar to how the military is subject to presidential regulations—he or she can make independent calls on changes to the police’s overall set-up. Against this background, there are many reasons why the leadership of the police would want to seek friendly relations with the incumbent president, lest the latter penalize them through sudden alterations to its regulatory framework and institutional decision making.

Outside of the police’s own institutional arena, the president’s cabinet formation powers are an attractive proposition for senior police leaders planning their post-service careers. Like their military counterparts, senior police officers need to prepare for their transition into civilian life once they reach retirement age (which currently is fifty-eight, based on a 2003 government regulation). An appointment to cabinet or a cabinet-level position is an ideal outcome for police leaders, but even positions at state-owned enterprises are much sought-after retirement bases. Budi Waseso, for example, was appointed as head of the national logistics board in 2018, overseeing the distribution of food items worth billions of dollars. Budi Gunawan, for his part, was named intelligence chief in 2016 (partly to remove him from the police), and he remained in that position after he reached retirement age in 2017. Widodo’s loyalist police chief Tito Karnavian became minister of home affairs in 2019. In short, presidents can offer lucrative and influential positions outside of the police to either reward officers who served them well or to remove those that did not (with the latter often requiring specific incentives to make way without causing major disruptions). If handled effectively, this presidential privilege of handing out patronage posts is a major counterbalance to the immense power that the police possess vis-à-vis the head of state.

The president’s budgetary powers are also essential to the police. After the separation of the police from the military in 1999, one of their main institutional interests has been to strengthen their institutional and budgetary independence. Gaining parity with the military in terms of state funding became a threshold by which the police assessed the success of this autonomy campaign and their standing in the rivalry with the armed forces. The president’s influence on the budgetary position of the police becomes evident when comparing the allocations to the police in the second Yudhoyono term with those in Widodo’s first. In the second Yudhoyono term, in the budget years 2010 to 2014, the police received on average 7.9 percent of the total funds flowing to government agencies. In the first Widodo term (2014–2019), this percentage increased substantially to 10.9 percent and rose further to 11.5 percent in 2020, the first year of his second term (Rizky 2019). These increases allowed the police to be almost at par with the armed forces, which has to divide its total budget into allocations to the army, navy, and air force. With Widodo’s help, then, the police transformed from the institutional and budgetary stepchild of the armed forces under Suharto and in the early post-New Order period into a socio-political and funding heavyweight. Widodo and his loyalists in the police have helped to spread this narrative in the force; in 2017, in front of Widodo, police chief Tito Karnavian told a gathering of police troops that the president had doubled the police budget in his first three years in office (Sohutoron 2017).

Moreover, the president’s hold over the state budget allows him or her to distribute favors to the police at politically opportune times. Most importantly, presidents can increase the salary for civil servants, military members, and police officers through direct government regulation. For instance, just one month before the 2019 election, Widodo announced an increase in the salary of all members of the police (CNN Indonesia 2019). Such increases are particularly important for the lower-ranking officers as they lack the lucrative patronage opportunities of their superiors. Although police (and military) members do not vote in elections, ordinary police members can influence the voting choices of their families and communities. Not coincidentally, the 2019 salary increase occurred during the police’s voter mobilization campaign, which was widely seen as benefitting the incumbent more than the challenger. Outside of election times, presidents can also help the police realize programs that further their socio-political standing. In April 2021, Widodo launched the police’s new TV and radio stations, offering government funding and endorsement. These channels gave the police additional instruments to deepen their entrenchment in society and shape public opinion. In his speech, Widodo made clear that he hoped that the police would repay his kindness by using the channels to fight “the disinformation of perceptions” (Yamin 2021), a reference widely understood to mean the spread of anti-government information on social media, which had—in the eyes of the president—escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Accordingly, while there are many reasons why a president would fear a hostile police force, equally strong reasons exist for the police to be anxious about an unsupportive or openly antagonistic president. The last time such a mutually hostile relationship developed was under Wahid, and both actors suffered as a result. At that time, Wahid tried to appoint a new police chief against the wishes of the force (and the legislature), creating strife within the police. Wahid, for his part, was impeached, with explicit reference to his irregular attempt to install a loyalist as police chief. Evidently, the incentives for both sides to seek an accommodative arrangement are compelling. Coalitional presidentialism offers such a two-sided accommodation, in which the police stabilize the rule of the incumbent in exchange for concessions that go well beyond the compensation police forces receive in polities with apolitical security forces. In a patronage-oriented society such as Indonesia, even seemingly routine appointments and budget allocations become part of a larger clientelist deal that includes informal agreements through which cabinet seats and other lucrative posts are handed to the police’s elite. In the next section, we turn to the exact mechanism through which the president and the police interact and perpetuate their institutionalized cooperation.

Managing the Police

To manage the role of the police as a member of presidential coalitions, the president has fewer formal channels available than in the case of the military. Recall that the president’s formal liaison with the armed forces is the military secretary stationed at the palace. The minister of defense can also serve as a communication bridge with the officer corps. In addition, the Paspampres—the presidential guard—which stays with the president around the clock, is exclusively made up of military personnel, and its commander has typically been a direct link between the head of state and the armed forces. No such channels exist in the case of the police. Formally, the military secretary is in charge of official business between the president and the police, especially when it comes to appointments. But the military secretary, who handles both the armed forces and the police, has invariably been a member of the armed forces. This arrangement, which is a leftover from the times when the police were a part of the armed forces, is unsatisfactory for the police. Besides, because no line ministry manages the police, the president can rely only on the coordinating minister for politics, legal, and security affairs to convey formal messages to the police. But as the coordinating minister has traditionally been a retired military officer (except Mahfud MD, a civilian who was appointed in 2019), the police are generally reluctant to use this communication mechanism. Thus, many interactions and negotiations between the president and the police must take place through informal relationships and processes.

At the heart of these informal communications is the presidential adjutant from the police, both when holding this position and when moving on to higher posts in the force. Though formally under the military secretary, the police adjutant also reports up the chain of the police hierarchy. One archetypical case in this regard is Listyo Sigit Prabowo, appointed police chief in January 2021. Widodo knew him when he was mayor of Solo, while Listyo was deputy chief of the police in the city. At his inauguration as president in 2014, Widodo had Listyo recruited as his adjutant, a position he held for two years. Subsequently, Listyo rose to the post of police chief of the province of Banten, an extraordinarily fast ascent in the police ranks. In 2019, he was appointed to the crucial Bareskrim portfolio, which he used to aggressively pursue Rizieq Shihab, the president’s main political opponent at that time. Throughout this period, Listyo was considered one of the police officers closest to the president. Hence, when the post of police chief became available in early 2021, few observers had any doubt that Listyo would be named. The close relations with the president helped Listyo overcome a significant obstacle that would have prevented the promotion of almost any other candidate to the police’s top post: he is Christian, and some Islamic activists expressed their opposition to a non-Muslim being placed in such an influential position (Pradewo 2020). But Widodo ignored these objections and completed the rise of his protégé from their joint time in Solo and the position of adjutant to the apex of the police organization.

The institution of police adjutants in the palace is therefore both an important communication channel and a pathway through which presidents groom future loyalist leaders of the police. We had discussed earlier the difficulties Widodo faced with the police when coming to power in 2014: forced to nominate Megawati’s pick for police chief, he then found it hard to overturn that nomination when it became indefensible in the eyes of public opinion. Even when he had found a solution, he still had to deal with the remnants of the powerful Budi Gunawan network in the police. Over time, however, Widodo placed more loyalists in the police, making negotiations with their leadership easier. Before Listyo, he had appointed Tito Karnavian, who turned out to be a staunch defender of the president’s interests. Tito had not been an adjutant to Widodo but enjoyed a close relationship with Luhut, the president’s problem-fixer (interview with Luhut Pandjaitan, Merauke, June 18, 2016). In 2016 and 2017, Tito was at the forefront of containing the fallout from the Islamist mass mobilizations, appearing personally at demonstrations to calm protesters. He also oversaw the first wave of legal cases against Rizieq Shihab that drove the latter into exile in 2017, and he visited him there to discuss terms for his possible return (Maharani 2021). At the same time, Tito stood up for police interests when negotiating with the president; as mentioned above, he credited Widodo (and implicitly, himself) with a significant increase in the police budget.

Tito was also at the center of another strategy of integrating the police into the president’s coalition: that is, increasing the police’s cabinet representation. Tito was appointed minister of home affairs in 2019—a position that had traditionally been held by retired military officers, bureaucrats, or party cadres. The ministry oversees the country’s regional civil service members and thus holds immense power; its control by a retired police officer gave the force influence over the nationwide bureaucratic hierarchy that runs parallel to the police’s (see table 5.1). Tito’s appointment continued a trend of expanding police representation in cabinet that had begun in Yudhoyono’s first term. In 2009, he handed the post of intelligence chief to Sutanto, the recently retired chief of police. This brought the number of cabinet-level posts for the police from one (that of the police chief itself) to two. As with the minister of home affairs, the post of intelligence chief had typically been a bastion of military officers, so its shift to the police was a remarkable gain in their rivalry with the armed forces. Tito’s ministry then brought the number of police representatives in cabinet to three, making the police (together with the oligarchs) the group with the most substantive increase in cabinet participation since 2004. This, in turn, confirmed the police’s increasing political weight and their recognition as a protagonist of coalitional presidentialism.

Ceremonial events—such as the one at which Tito thanked the president for budgetary increases—are important sites of negotiation over and affirmation of the police’s membership in the presidential coalition. These events are even more essential to the police than to the military, as the police lack some of the formal linkages to the president that the armed forces enjoy through their entrenchment in the palace. In July 2019, for instance, Tito used the celebrations for the seventy-third anniversary of the police to ask Widodo for an increase in the allowances for police personnel (in Indonesia, allowances for government employees are a key component of the take-home pay, often constituting a larger proportion than the base salary). In a polite but firm tone, Tito remarked that “we are hopeful that you, Mister President, can lift the working allowances for … police members in the next five years of your leadership to 100 percent [of the base salary]” (Batubara 2019). This request came two years after Tito had lauded the president for large budget increases, and just months after a pre-election increase in the police’s base salary. Now that the president had won re-election, Tito staked the police’s claim on more privileges in the president’s second term, which—as Tito hinted at indirectly—the police had some role in obtaining for Widodo. The president reacted to the request by increasing some segmental benefits but did not meet the suggested 100 percent threshold. In doing so, Widodo displayed both his willingness to accommodate some of the police’s expectations and, at the same time, his presidential authority as the powerful master of the purse who does not simply give in to any demand made.

In other areas of the president’s relationship with the police, agreements evolve without direct negotiations. In the case of the KPK, for example, Widodo gradually adopted the police’s critical view as a result of his changing attitudes toward the anti-corruption agency. The police had for a long time looked at the KPK as an usurper of their own functions (indeed, the latter had been established in 2003 because the police were considered too implicated in corruption itself). Widodo, by contrast, had pledged during the 2014 campaign to work closely with the KPK and had (unsuccessfully) favored its then-chairman Abraham Samad as his running mate. But when Widodo asked the KPK to screen his ministerial candidates ahead of his first cabinet announcement, the agency ruled out many of the nominees, creating headaches for Widodo and leading him to ignore the advice. We also noted how the KPK’s naming of Budi Gunawan as a suspect produced the first crisis of the Widodo presidency. Subsequently, Widodo became more open to the lobbying of the police and other actors against the KPK. Ultimately, in September 2019 the KPK law was changed in a way that weakened the agency, and Widodo also agreed to the police’s suggestion to put one of their own, Firli, in charge of it. Tellingly, Yudhoyono had undergone a similar transformation in his presidency—he was initially keen to be seen as a KPK supporter, but the arrest of a relative by the KPK in November 2008 changed the president’s attitude. Toward the end of his presidency, he spoke of the KPK as an out-of-control “superbody” (Viva 2009). However, unlike Widodo, he shied away from joining the police in their determination to emasculate it.

Hence, Indonesian presidents manage the police as a key actor in their coalitions through the use of the police adjutant as a communication bridge and future presidential ally in the police leadership; delicate placements of other loyalists in the police’s senior hierarchy; the careful calibration of police representation in cabinet, reflecting their grown power since the end of authoritarianism in the late 1990s; timely increases of budgets, negotiated through both private and public interactions, often involving ceremonial events; and a natural adaptation of conservative political stances by presidents over time, as their reformist impetus wanes and they become more sympathetic to the police’s long-held status quo ideology. In order to further explore the dynamics of the relationship between presidents and the police, and how the interests of both are served in the framework of coalitional presidentialism, the next section details the rise of Tito Karnavian from professional police officer to presidential loyalist and, eventually, one of the chief ideologues of the Widodo government.

Tito Karnavian and Police Politics

Like many Indonesian elite actors, Tito Karnavian has often portrayed himself as coming from humble beginnings. The family’s narrative has been that Tito entered the police academy, which was then part of the armed forces academy, so that his parents would not have to pay the fees for more expensive study programs (Inge 2019). But there are indications that the family held what could then be considered middle-class status—especially given the historical context of Tito’s youth. Tito was born in 1964, just before the 1966 takeover by the military. Tito’s father was then a state radio journalist in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra, and he helped establish the branch of the military newspaper Angkatan Bersenjata there (Hendrawan 2016). This would have given Tito’s father access to military and police circles—and made entry into the academy a natural choice. Furthermore, when Tito studied at the academy in the mid-1980s, Suharto’s New Order was at the height of its power. Although the police were subordinated to the armed forces at that time, they were still a central element of the New Order’s security infrastructure, and being among its leaders promised a chance to obtain a place at the table of the elite. His father later insisted that he would have preferred his son to study medicine (Inge 2019), but Tito’s chosen pathway was at least as prestigious.

There is no doubt that Tito was exceptionally bright. He excelled at the academy and was sent to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s to get a master’s degree in police studies. This was followed by a series of other study programs both in Indonesia and abroad, giving him good command of English and a wide network of contacts. In 2013, his educational career culminated with a PhD in security studies from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Parallel to these educational achievements, he made a name for himself as a professional and straightforward police officer with a special interest in counter-terrorism. After the 2002 Bali bombings, he helped track down leading terrorists affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the organization responsible for the attacks. As an officer in the Special Detachment 88 (Densus 88) for counter-terrorism from 2005, he helped arrest two of JI’s key leaders, Azahari Husin and Noordin Mohammad Top. Partly because of these successes, he was made the head of Densus 88 in 2009, the deputy of the National Agency for the Management of Terrorism (BNPT) in 2011, and the police chief of Papua in 2012. Internationally and domestically, Tito now had the reputation of one of Indonesia’s most outstanding police leaders (Della-Giacoma 2013).

But there was one additional feature in Tito’s career that attracted Widodo’s attention in 2015 when he was screening candidates for the future leadership of the police. Importantly, Tito was not part of Budi Gunawan’s patronage network in the police, which had created many difficulties for Widodo at the start of his presidency. In the context of Widodo’s coalition-building strategies, Tito’s exclusion from the Gunawan clique made him highly qualified to assist the president in turning the police from a hostile actor into a reliable ally. Tito’s close relationship with Luhut gave the president further confidence that the rising star would stay loyal if promoted to high office. Once Widodo and Luhut had made their choice, Tito’s rise to the top was rapid. After the end of his stint in Papua in 2014 (just as the Yudhoyono presidency ended), Tito had initially been parked in a marginal post at police headquarters—an appointment some attributed to his lack of links to the Gunawan network. But under Widodo, Tito was made chief of the Jakarta police in June 2015—one of the most coveted two-star positions in the force. As Tito needed a third star before becoming police chief, he was moved up to BNPT chief in March 2016, before being nominated as head of police in July 2016. Within roughly a year, Widodo had maneuvered a loyalist into the top job at the police. To be sure, this appointment did not fully marginalize the Budi Gunawan network, but as its patron was handed the post of intelligence chief some months after Tito’s installation, the clique felt better integrated into the president’s regime as well (McBeth 2016). At the same time, Tito filled some other police posts with his allies.

The alliance between Widodo and Tito worked well for the president, the police, and Tito personally. We already noted that Tito stood up for Widodo as Islamist demonstrations threatened his presidency; helped mobilize voters to get to the ballot box in 2019; and built cases against Rizieq that encouraged the latter to leave the country. But Tito did significantly more than that. Under his watch, for example, the criminalization of critics of the president experienced a sharp increase, especially in the lead-up to the 2019 elections. Anti-government activists or ordinary citizens who criticized the president or other elite figures on social media were charged with violation of the 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transactions. In Yudhoyono’s second term (2009–2014), there had only been 74 such cases; in Widodo’s first (2014–2019), this number shot up to 233, with 82 of them directly related to the alleged insult of the president (Mashabi 2020). In addition to entangling critics of the president in legal cases, the police’s actions stifled the general willingness of citizens to state their view of the government openly. In a September 2020 opinion survey, 69.6 percent of respondents agreed that citizens were “increasingly” afraid of stating their opinion (Safitri 2020); interestingly, however, an equally large majority continued to approve of the president’s performance. Thus, Tito’s police had limited freedom of expression without undermining the president’s standing in public opinion. If anything, the silencing of harsh criticism of the president contributed to the sense of Widodo’s deepening entrenchment in the state and society.

For the police, the benefits they received from Tito’s coalition with the president did not only include the budgetary increases mentioned above. More broadly, the police were able to cultivate their conservative socio-political agenda from a position of privileged access to the presidency. While initially viewed as a reformer, Tito increasingly propagated this police conservatism—which centered around the belief in a strong centralized state that imposes order on a chaotic citizenry—as he moved to the top of the organization. In June 2016, just one month before he was made police chief, he justified to this author the arrest of Papuan separatists on treason charges for simply raising pro-independence flags: “You [as a German] should understand that a state needs to protect itself against its enemies. In Germany, you also have rules against Nazi flags” (discussion with Tito Karnavian, Canberra, June 9, 2016). The parallelization of Papuan separatists with Nazis highlighted the widespread belief in the police force that state repression is acceptable against any opponent of the Indonesian national project and the majoritarian constituency in which it is embedded. As police chief, Tito also cemented the exclusion of LGBTI groups and citizens from this national consensus. Under his leadership, the police launched an unprecedented wave of raids on gay venues in 2016 and 2017, many operating as private clubs. To do so, he argued that homosexuals being naked in a private home violated the pornography law, as potentially anyone could walk into such a home (BBC Indonesia 2017). By way of explanation, he stated that “Indonesia is not Australia, England, or the United States. We have our own culture.”

The alliance with the president also secured the material privileges of the officer class, including Tito. Like in the case of the armed forces, the president closed his eyes toward the signs of significant wealth among police leaders with nominally low salaries. When Tito was nominated as police chief, he disclosed to parliament that he owned an apartment in Singapore and that his children had gone to school there (Rini 2016)—all indications of remarkable affluence. Tito’s wealth continued to grow proportionally to his professional advancement. Between 2014 and 2019, his officially reported net worth more than doubled from Rp 7.7 billion to Rp 18 billion (US$1.3 million), with a 2018 salary and allowance of about Rp 49.6 million (US$3,500) per month, or Rp 595 million (US$42,500) per year. Among the five candidates for the chief of police position in 2021, four had a reported wealth of above Rp 5 billion, or US$350,000 (in a country where 82 percent of the population had a median wealth of less than US$10,000 in 2019). Thus, just as when Tito entered the academy in the mid-1980s, the career as a high-ranking police officer continued to promise lucrative income opportunities, despite the fall of authoritarianism and subsequent democratization. The police, through their coalitional arrangements with sitting presidents, have retained crucial socio-political weight in democratic Indonesia, which has translated into immense ideological influence and the successful defense of the officers’ high social status.

Tito’s promotion to minister of home affairs at the beginning of Widodo’s second term in 2019 brought the police further opportunities to expand their socio-political influence. Tito quickly assumed the role of a leading skeptic of the democratic reforms that Indonesia had achieved since 1998. While illiberalism spread widely in the Indonesian elite and society in the late 2010s (Hadiz 2018), few key actors developed their conservative political ideas as systematically and eloquently as Tito. One of his main ideas was introducing the notion of “asymmetric local elections,” by which poorer regions would not be given the right to vote for their governors, district heads, or mayors, while those with higher economic development levels would. “We have to look at [each region’s] democratic maturity,” Tito proclaimed in June 2020. “Are the people of a specific region really ready to elect a leader? Do they understand that they have to elect the right leader?” (CNN Indonesia 2020). Such a model, which in effect questioned the principle of universal suffrage, would throw Indonesia back behind the introduction of direct local elections in 2005. In terms of the ideas driving such a proposal, it would even question the one-person-one-vote paradigm that took hold in many older democracies after World War I and in the newly independent nations after World War II. But Tito was unimpressed by criticisms of his position. He was convinced that Indonesia’s liberal post-Suharto reforms had created instability and that the state had to recapture some rights from its citizens that had been granted to them in a hurry after 1998. During the pandemic, he also styled himself as the representative of a strong-hand government, overseeing those public health measures that were the responsibility of local governments to enforce.⁴

Tito’s rise, then, illustrated the growth of the police’s power in the post-New Order era in general and under post-2004 coalitional presidentialism in particular. Through careful maneuvering and clever identification of the needs of incumbent presidents, Tito brought himself and the police into a position of great leverage vis-à-vis other actors. When Widodo needed a loyalist in the police to counterbalance the power of the Budi Gunawan network, Tito stepped up and carried out the job in exchange for rewards for him and his institution. By the time he moved into the Ministry of Home Affairs, the police were arguably at the zenith of their power in Indonesia’s post-independence history. The president, for his part, benefitted from having a reliable coalition partner that he could mobilize in times of crisis. When Tito retired from the force in 2019, a temporary replacement was installed before the known Widodo loyalist Listyo was ready to take over. Although Listyo still faced the influence of the Gunawan clique, he ensured that the most senior police leadership positions were controlled by officers linked to the palace, and that the police were rewarded accordingly. Through their operations, Tito and Listyo embodied the relationship of mutual dependency between presidents and the police in post-2004 coalitional presidentialism. While presidents depend on the support of loyal police officers to protect their rule from security disturbances and disruptive dissent, police leaders appreciate that their material and ideological interests are best protected if the president is on their side.

The two preceding chapters have demonstrated how Indonesian presidents have integrated the country’s two leading security agencies, the military and police, into their system of coalitional presidentialism. Both were given cabinet representation; both were rewarded with material favors; and both were targets of the president’s appointment strategies, which made leaders of the two institutions part of the palace’s inner circle but also tied them to the executive’s interests. Indonesian presidents have, in times of heightened socio-political tensions, played the two actors off against each other. Widodo, trying to address the police’s hostility at the beginning of his term, turned to the military for support. While this stabilized his rule, it also increased the president’s dependence on both forces: once he had made Tito the chief of police, he found it hard to downgrade his ties to the military, and he also needed to hand more concessions to the police to reward Tito for his loyalty. Thus, the careful balancing of the military and the police—drawing from a decades-old rivalry between the two—has handed presidents short-term tactical wins. However, it has also forced them to consider the forces’ vested interests when designing national policies. This pattern, in turn, has shielded both institutions from reform efforts that could threaten their privileges. In other words, the loyalty of both organizations to the sitting president is systematically purchased by their integration into the latter’s broad coalition that protects the status quo and the distribution of resources underpinning the stability of its operations.

At the same time, it is important to note that Indonesian presidents are not puppets of the military or police.⁵ Just as presidents rely on the two security agencies to prevent the destabilization of their governments, so do the military and police depend on the president’s patronage. Senior military and police leaders can gain promotion to the next level in their career only with the approval or acquiescence of the president, and the way to more money for their institutions leads through the president’s power of the purse. Security agency leaders may try to gain advancement with the support of other powerful allies and display hostility to the president—as Budi Gunawan initially did—and may succeed in retaining positions of significant influence. But as the Gunawan and Budi Waseso cases showed, presidents can remove opponents from posts that are most crucial to their interests. Hence, seeking a mutually beneficial relationship with the president has proven to be a more promising strategy for military and police leaders than aggressively trying to extort concessions from him or her. According to a senior Golkar politician, the police patrons Tito, Listyo, and Gunawan were all central figures in an (ultimately failed) attempt to allow Widodo to run for a third term, or at least extend his existing term by a few years. “We at Golkar received a lot of pressure from the president’s inner circle to publicly call for a third term for [Widodo], or to extend his term. We first didn’t pay much attention, but when the chief of police, the home minister and the intelligence chief conveyed that wish to us, we knew it was serious” (confidential interview, Jakarta, June 23, 2022). Evidently, the logic of exchanging loyalty for favors inherent in conventional coalitional presidentialism had deeply permeated the security forces.

This approach by both sides of the coalitional presidentialism equation—the head of state and the security agencies—has given Indonesia a less democracy-damaging outcome than experienced by some of its Southeast Asian neighbors. In Thailand and Myanmar, military and police forces have often eschewed compromise with executive leaders. Instead, they have aimed to coerce and—if that failed—replace them. The deep democratic crises of both countries, with coups occurring in the 2010s and 2020s, have been the direct result of the failure of civilian leaders and security agency officers to find a stable framework for cooperation. Indonesia, by contrast, has established such a framework by treating the security agencies in the same way that other socio-political actors with potential veto authority are treated. They are situated as recipients of presidential patronage as part of large executive coalitions as long as they pledge loyalty to the president. In return, presidents refrain from crossing the red lines drawn by the security agencies, both in the material and ideological realms. This allowed Indonesian democracy to endure overall but has also led to its quality declining whenever presidents needed to grant concessions to allied security actors to secure the survival of their coalitions. Within this framework of cooperation between presidents and security forces, the military revived its anti-communist scare campaign under Widodo, while the police pushed its conservative socio-political agenda and placed its leaders in influential positions outside of the police. Democracy suffered under these influences but did not collapse; with this, the narrative of the security agency’s role in presidential coalitions fits neatly into the picture of Indonesian democracy in the 2010s and 2020s.