After Ibrahim Hassan, the village head (‘umda) of Bagour, spent a year in prison between 1897 and 1898, he vowed to never break the law again. The Tanta Criminal Court had sentenced Hasan to eight months in prison for torturing suspects in a case of robbery in his village. In the years after his release, he tried to embody the respectable and charitable man. After some advocacy from a high-ranking local official, a khedival order granted Hassan a general pardon. The former ‘umda of Bagour would no longer be haunted by his criminal past. Hassan’s crime, sentencing, and eventual pardon raise questions about the criminal justice system in modern Egypt. Was Hassan’s violence an overzealous attempt to fight crime? Was he a tyrant who brutalized villagers? Was Hassan a policing agent, a tyrant, or a criminal? The hundreds of petitions, letters, and correspondences pertaining to ‘umdas in the Egyptian National Archives reveal that these puzzles were not Hassan’s alone. Many villagers petitioned against ‘umdas who wronged them. ‘Umdas’ crimes ranged from terrorizing villagers to illegally confiscating lands, and from aiding infamous criminals and bandits to petty thefts. Conversely, many villagers petitioned to reappoint dismissed ‘umdas whom they believed to be just and incorruptible officials. I interrogate the seemingly contradictory roles that ‘umdas played in policing and committing crimes in their villages and in shaping law and (in)justice. If we center rural conditions, specifically the intersection between landholding and policing powers, what can we learn about the meanings of justice and crime in Egyptian villages during a period of sweeping legal and economic changes? Did villagers see ‘umdas as tyrants, state representatives, or administrators of justice? Where and how did villagers seek justice? What was the ‘umdas’ relationship to crime and criminals and to the local police station and state bureaucracy? Using state archives, book fairs, visual and auditory material, memoirs, fiction, and oral history, I argue that the specificity of rural social and economic conditions, reforms, and gendered regimes shaped different categories of and interactions between “criminals,” “villagers,” and “law enforcers.” The village itself, rather than courts, police stations, or siyasa councils takes shape as a primary site of the making and unmaking of criminal justice.The liminality of ‘umdas also allows us to see “law enforcers” and “criminals” not as pre-social categories, but as social, legal, and bureaucratic subject positions that are always under construction and negotiation.