Broken police system

A recent news report about the success of anti-gang operations in south Punjab and upper Sindh has once again exposed the inability of the police to effectively fight crime. Despite being a joint operation of the Sindh and Punjab police, Sindh’s top cop says they need help from the military and other security institutions in eliminating the gang presence. The comment is concerning, given that both provinces regularly throw money at the police to establish new elite units, only for them to be wound up or folded into existing units after failing to meet their goals. After 75 years, politicians and bureaucrats have failed to assemble even one police unit capable of handling gang violence without calling in the army. But it is not just training. Police regularly claim that the gangs have more “sophisticated weapons” even though the aftermath of police operations usually reveal that while the criminals are often well-armed, the weaponry is usually, at best, standard fare, and often old and unreliable.

But no story of police incompetence is complete without mentioning the impact of politicians abusing police resources, mostly by demanding unnecessary security details. In Islamabad, for example, recent years have seen about half of all available police officials deployed on VVIP security for a few hundred politicians while the other two million people that live or work in the capital and its suburbs have to suffer the impact of rising crime due to the lack of manpower to scare off or pursue criminals. The situation is generally worse in rural areas, such as the gang-riddled provincial border area, not just because police presence is spread more thinly, but also due to poor resource misallocation which is even more brazen due to the lack of oversight, whether governmental or from citizens and the media. While reforms are urgently needed to address resource misallocation, politicians must also acknowledge their own direct and indirect roles in causing law and order problems that make the lives of citizens less secure.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2023.

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