Out of control

There is a disturbing frequency to reports of police brutality and violence, and an equally disturbing and worrying spread of incidence from all provinces and across urban and rural areas of the country.

Although it is unwise to generalise, to the average eye the police appear to be a law unto themselves, and judge, jury and executioner when they choose to be. Much of the evidence for this is not merely anecdotal but gathered by news crews which document police violence on unarmed civilian groups, and citizen journalists with smart-phones and a sharp eye for the use of social media. All of which points to police forces that are either badly trained and led or a combination of both, a complete lack of accountability and an equal absence of political will in terms of reform of a vital element of governance. Public confidence in the police remains low; the police are widely mistrusted and seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The latest case of alleged police brutality in Karachi illustrates the point. A worker of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement has died in the custody of the police at Aziz Bhatti police station on June 3, and the post mortem report states that he died of cardiac failure which was the result of a head injury. His body also bore deep cuts and other marks of torture that are not self-inflicted. Consequent to this a number of police have been suspended. It is an irrelevance as to what the victim was arrested for, and if arrested in connection with a criminal offence then the police are right in doing their job. Murdering suspects in their custody is not part of their job. Neither torturing suspects to extract a confession nor for any other reason.

Describing the police action in this matter as merely ‘high-handed’ understates the gravity of it by several orders of magnitude. A man has been unlawfully killed, in all likelihood by the police personnel who arrested him. The chances of the culprits being brought to book are vanishingly small, and the rule of law a sorry, perverted travesty of itself.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 5^th, 2015.

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