Khaled Fahmy's classic study of Egyptian police in the third quarter of the nineteenth century shows that the institution of the dabtiyya was closer to the people and more trusted and powerful than the majalis courts. Whereas his study depicts a moment in time, this paper seeks to describe change in the decades that followed. The dabtiyya retained its role as a one-stop site of informal dispute resolution, but the policing institution had matured—soured, even—by the turn of the century. The notorious foreign personnel of the urban police were removed in the 1880s, but even for “natives” a police career meant sustained collaboration with the entrenched British occupation. The structures of police institutions are archivally elusive, both in past and present. This paper uses criminal judicial dossiers to reconstruct the work that took place at police stations in turn-of-the-century Egypt. Its central narrative is drawn from a 1905 corruption case that took place within a district police station in Alexandria. This case shows that the police was a complex institution, certainly of the state, but not a panopticon or even a well-ordered power center. The police station was a microcosm of the city's jurisdictional mixity, but not a site of particular fluidity. By the turn of the century, its bureaucracy was entrenched and routine; the police were an unrivaled source of order, but they were not particularly good at their job. The police were, however, the principal means by which the law of the expanding state was diffused. Since 'Abd al-Wahhab Bakr's classic institutional studies of the police, historians' understanding of that law has developed in depth and breadth. This paper seeks to complement recent efforts to explain the legal pluralism of late British/Ottoman Egyptian lawyers to consider the crucial matter of implementation. As Samera Esmeir has shown, the colonial state depended on bold assertion of sovereignty by judges, officials, and police administrators. The everyday work of the police with the people, where the formal meets the informal, reveals that on the ground, modern law was less doctrinally fascinating—and more procedurally complex—than the current literature has shown.