Almost immediately after the League of Nations granted Britain the Palestine Mandate, British police authorities were granted broad powers to impose British notions of law and order. The Prevention of Crimes Ordinance (1920), the Police Ordinance (1921), and the Collective Punishment Ordinance (1926) allowed authorities to hold entire villages and tribes responsible for the commission of any crimes within their bounds and to punish them accordingly. During the same period, disputes between individuals, families, or villages—particularly in rural areas of Palestine—were often resolved through unofficial reconciliation settlements (sulh), which attached responsibility for prior crimes and potential violations of the agreement to entire communities or parts thereof. My paper will look at these two phenomena — collective punishment and sulh — in juxtaposition. Drawing largely on British administrative reports and Arabic-language Palestinian press accounts from the early 1930s, this paper will focus specifically on the important role played by Palestinian policemen in the conclusion of sulh settlements as well as in the execution of collective punishment in rural Palestine. Palestinian policemen were often key actors in sulh arrangements, using their local knowledge to bring the appropriate parties together and arranging a solution that would be acceptable to all, while their official position lent legitimacy to the proceedings and, often, the threat of repercussions if the agreement did not hold. Meanwhile, a close examination of how the Prevention of Crimes Ordinance, the Police Ordinance, and the Collective Punishment Ordinance were implemented indicates that Palestinian policemen were active there, too, in determining the extent of the penalty and who in the village being punished should be held responsible and/or fined in the event of further unrest. Police involvement in these phenomena indicates the degree to which the boundaries between “unofficial” justice, such as agreements forged between families whose disciplinary force derived from the prestige and honor of those coming to the agreement and the witnesses, and “official” justice, enforced by policemen and adjudicated by the courts and deriving its force from the power of the state, were often blurred or unclear. This paper will thus explore how British notions of law and order were supplemented by, replaced with, or reconfigured through the lens of traditional justice and how British administrators capitalized on the ambiguous position of the Palestinian policeman to blur the boundaries between the official and the unofficial and draw rural communities and the state into more tightly bound relationship.