This dissertation uses the history of French colonial policing in Vietnam to expand our understanding of racial hierarchy and violence in colonial societies. By concentrating on personnel themselves, it considers the police not as an institution removed from colonial society but as individuals embedded in a larger colonial order. Police encounters further speak to the texture of colonial life and serve as a lens to view how colonialism became constituted at the street level. Understanding the police through society and society through the police are the dual objectives of this study. Race was the primary variable governing the colonial order, yet racial boundaries in French Vietnam proved fluid. Assimilationist policies permitted Pondicherry Indians, naturalized Vietnamese, métis, and others with citizenship to join the European ranks, while in the lower hierarchy Vietnamese subjects made up the remaining 65% to 80%, along with a minority of Cambodians and Chinese interpreters. However, race remained deeply connected to individual authority, prestige, and violence in ways that proved problematic for a colonial policing institution. Focusing on Saigon, Cholon, Hanoi, and Haiphong, this study probes the logic and limits of race as the ordering principle in the police and in colonial spaces more broadly. One result was that intermediary Vietnamese agents exercised a degree of independence because of their role as translators, as interpreters but also as filters of colonial knowledge. In the upper cadre, the employment of Vietnamese and Indians embodied the radical potential to subvert the colonial order because it gave, at times, non-Europeans authority over Europeans in matters of police. Meanwhile, the many conflicts between white policemen and more affluent civilians, in particular Chinese businessmen, reveals that class differences did not overlay neatly with the racial order. But rather than obviate the importance of race, socioeconomic discrepancies magnified it. As police agents jockeyed for colonial privilege they exposed a gulf between modest wages and expectations about colonial lifestyle that fueled petty corruption and more serious abuses. Police violence resulted less from a directive of state repression and more from a police culture fed by expectations of privilege and shielded by de facto impunity.