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Across liberal democracies, human rights have become the lingua franca of police reform and accountability. The debate runs in well-worn grooves: rights protect individuals against the coercive state, courts hold police to account - or, in the familiar counter-critique, rights shield suspects at the expense of victims. Yet twenty-five years of experience under the UK's Human Rights Act 1998 reveals a more complex picture. Through systematic analysis of the Human Rights Act case law, this paper identifies four distinct mechanisms through which judicial encounters with police power have operated: tempering power (constraining routine police authorities); enabling power (authorizing contested police actions); legitimating power (validating the exercise of state authority); and channelling power (imposing positive obligations that direct investigative priorities). This doctrinal analysis challenges assumptions (common to jurisdictions with and without bills of rights) about the purely protective character of human rights law, revealing instead how it has come to constitute, not merely constrain, modern police power.