This article is part of a series titled “Is there a way forward for Pakistan?” Read more about the series here.
A Policy, Unabandoned
In January this year, an official report revealed that the Punjab Police had killed more than 600 ‘suspects’ in police encounters between 2018 and 2022. On average, that means more than a hundred people were killed by the police each year, over a period of five years. Last year, VoicePK.net compiled data from 2021 on police use of deadly force, using 154 open-source articles from Dawn. While not all instances of police violence are reported in English-language media in Pakistan, their report is nonetheless illuminating. VoicePK.net’s report found that in 2021 at least 217 people were killed at the hands of the police, with 194 killed in encounters, across the country. This is aside from other instances of police brutality, such as illegal detentions, torture, and crossfire injuries. The results indicated that police brutality in Pakistan was not only weaponised in 2021, but exceeded the levels observed in 2020.
My own data on police encounter killings in Karachi, compiled through open sources (newspaper reports, police reports, and human rights commission reports), suggests that more than 3,400 people were killed in encounters with the police across the city from 2011 to 2022. It’s worth noting of course that a majority of these ‘encounter killings’ took place during security operations in Karachi (primarily between 2011 and 2018), and it is difficult, if not impossible, to decipher what proportion of these were ‘fake’ or ‘staged’ and which were ‘genuine’ (i.e., legitimate shoot-outs between the police and suspects). It is also worth pointing out that during the same twelve-year period (2011-2022), at least 682 police officials were also killed in encounters, or in targeted attacks against the police. Furthermore, while 53 civilians died in encounters in 2021, more than 120 were killed in 2022. This echoes the conclusions of VoicePK.net’s report, that there is not only a sustained dependency on encounter killings, but that we may be seeing an increase in the recent past.
Reliance upon extrajudicial police violence has furthered specific political and economic agendas of the Pakistani security state. Such police vigilantism has long been a central weapon of Pakistan’s authoritarian and violent politics, and our collective obsession with security provision and operations. It shows the persistence of authoritarian policing practices in the country, in spite of (and sometimes to enable) regime change and political transitions. Its persistence highlights how successive governments have, to varying degrees, permitted the police an informal license to kill and injure.
One would have imagined that following the national—and, indeed, international—rage following Naqeebullah Mehsud’s killing by former SSP Rao Anwar’s team in Karachi, a categorical reliance upon such police vigilantism would be reconsidered, or significantly lessened if not abandoned entirely. But barring a temporary lull in 2018 (at least in Karachi), the case of Pakistan demonstrates that police vigilantism is symptomatic of a deeper disease, and not simply institutional rot. In this article, I explore some of the key institutional and political factors behind extrajudicial police violence, before considering a way forward.
Police vigilantism has long been a central weapon of Pakistan’s authoritarian and violent politics, and our collective obsession with security provision and operations.
Police Vigilantism
Scholarship on vigilantism has ceased to consider vigilante violence as simply that which is inflicted by private actors and perpetrators. State institutions, such as the police and security institutions, can similarly be considered as resorting to vigilante violence, among a range of informal behaviours and practices. Drawing on the cases of South Africa and Nigeria, S.J. Cooper-Knock and Oliver Owen (2015) define police vigilantism as a form of informalised action on the part of the police that is often expected by people. “People make frequent use of the Police to mediate on their behalf ‘off the books’ and some of this informalised action, which involves the exercise of illegal physical coercion nuanced by the simultaneous possession of legal authority, can be termed ‘police vigilantism’.”.
Writing on police impunity in the Philippines, Peter Kreuzer (2022) explains how police vigilantism is often masked. “Killing suspects in on-duty armed encounters allows the police to lay claim to the operations while denying their extralegal nature. The police can label the killings as successful crime control and, in this way, mask their vigilante quality as long as they obtain the support of the public and establishment elite for this framing. Framing extralegal killings as self-defence in the context of on-duty armed encounters thus allows the re-establishment of the police as successful guardians of societal peace and order and provides a way out of their inability to successfully fight crime while upholding the rule of law”.
These perspectives hint at several factors that make police vigilantism possible, including: (1) public and private demand, especially that of the state and its elite, (2) institutional dynamics, and (3) claims-making. Let’s explore some of these further to see how and why extrajudicial police violence persists in Pakistan.
Politics Factors and Institutional Fault-Lines
As I explore in my book, Insecure Guardians, policing in Pakistan continues to be driven by colonial logics of policing and counterinsurgency. There are a few ways in which this has enabled a persistent reliance upon extrajudicial police violence.
First, the colonial design of the police has kept an officer class distinct from the majority of the force (the rank and file), wherein the latter’s main task has been abiding by the instructions of the former, often under serious institutional pressures, financial restrictions, and physical insecurities given the continuous threat of death in the line of duty. This has, I argue in my work, fostered militarism in policing, or a staunch dependency upon the use of excessive force to address a range of socio-political challenges that are framed as national security “threats”. Such fostering of militarism in policing has meant that the rank-and-file are expected to operate as “violence workers”, at the servitude of the state and its elite, whose informal practices will be at least tolerated, if not demanded and expected.
Exacerbating this dynamic, is the normalisation of war metaphors, wherein the police are “on the frontlines”, fighting in the “war on terror”. While many officers regret this dependency on police vigilantism and extrajudicial violence, why they believe in implementing this policy is also important to consider. Officers with whom I spoke while researching for my book, frequently justified police vigilantism as “necessary” because Pakistan was in “a state of war” and that they were told (by their political and military patrons) to “save the country”.
What enables such militarism and its resulting violence work on the part of the police, is also an institutional lack of trust in the broader criminal justice system. Knowing that taking specific cases to courts will result in witnesses getting spoiled, or judges “being bought”, or cases falling through due to lack of investigative capacity fosters a lack of trust in the overall judicial process. Simultaneously, it puts increasing pressure on the police “to deliver”, especially under extraneous circumstances (e.g., following the launch of security/counterterrorism operations).
This pressure to deliver, coupled with their own insecurities resulting from being positioned “on the frontlines”, and the realisation that they lack public legitimacy and public trust themselves, creates room for claims-making. This is what Kreuzer implies when he meant that specific police encounters and extra-legal violence are framed as “self-defence” (or carried out in defence of the nation or the state), to allow the police to lay claims to such encounters and keep re-establishing themselves as “guardians of peace and order”, without actually abiding by the rule of law.
The institutional reliance upon police vigilantism or extra-legal police violence as an informal practice thus becomes a formal performance indicator. It serves as a way for the police to demonstrate their success; displays of violence (sometimes theatrical) that are not always legal, but not always considered as illegitimate either, can be presented as important data points in annual reports demonstrating police performance.
Knowing that taking specific cases to courts will result in witnesses getting spoiled, or judges “being bought”, or cases falling through due to lack of investigative capacity fosters a lack of trust in the overall judicial process.
Supporting these dynamics, is state patronage of selected “violence workers”. The political patronage of former SSP Rao Anwar is case in point. In the 1990s, Anwar was groomed as a violence worker at a time when the biggest security threat to the regime appeared to come from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in Karachi, and when police officers were expected and rewarded—by civilian and military elite alike—to “fight terror with terror”. But Anwar (and later, Chaudhury Aslam) were not the only officers patronised for serving political agendas, nor were Karachi or Sindh unique in witnessing such forms of informal policing practices (in this case, police vigilantism). We know from the not-so-distant memory, of horrific incidents such as the Sahiwal Encounter, or the rather curious killing of Malik Ishaq, that excessive police violence has been a key component of state coercion in Pakistan’s largest province. And there is some history behind the demand for police vigilantism in Punjab too.
Hassan Javid’s (2020) research has shown that between 2008 and 2018, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government in Punjab used its control of the bureaucracy, and especially the police, to influence electoral outcomes in 2013. This was enabled by the “extensive networks of patronage and clientelism” that the PMLN established. But this was not the only period in which the PMLN exerted such influence over the police. This was similarly witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s when police encounters began to be observed in Punjab, and steadily increased between 1997 to 1999 when encounter killings were weaponised to target PML-N’s opponents. This was enabled in part because of a nexus between PML-N, crime, and policing in Punjab. As Javid explains, two notorious officers (Naveed Saeed and Abid Boxer) were reputed “encounter specialists” in this period, and both were close to the Punjab government. Saeed particularly was known to have close links with criminal gangs (e.g., the Gogi Butt gang) and was also responsible for the killing of gangster Hanifa Baba “who coincidentally happened to be opposed to both the PML-N government and its criminal allies”.
Javid suggests, what is true across Pakistan (and evidenced starkly in the case of Karachi and the operations against the MQM and in the neighbourhood of Lyari), that “the link between parties, crime, and the police must… be understood in the context of how governments in Pakistan have historically used their control over the police to exercise a check on their political opponents”. The need to keep this “check” on forms of political opposition (i.e., workers of opposing political parties, members of insurgent organisations, dissidents, even journalists) is what incentivises and drives the police to take informalised action and act “off the books”, i.e., engage in police vigilantism (to draw upon the definition by Cooper-Knock and Owen above).
The Way Forward?
In Pakistan, police vigilantism as a strategy is unlikely to be abandoned until governance and security policies are rethought and reimagined. The police, first and foremost, does the “work” of the state and its elites, which is true in large parts of the world. These political masters design security threats and criminalise objects and subjects as deemed fit (from dissent to disobedience to demonstrations). As long as these designs are sustained, policies of securitisation maintained, and a colonial logic of policing is retained, our political elite will ensure that there are always pliable, reliable pools of police agents ready to act at the behest of state and national interest, and manifest police vigilantism. At the moment, there appears to be no political will in Pakistan to revamp policing and law enforcement to serve the people, as a result of which police accountability and transparency remain a distant dream. This also means instances of police vigilantism will, most of the time, be under-investigated if not altogether ignored.
Furthermore, policing practices cannot change while social and economic disparities remain unaddressed. This is, at the very least, and given the discussion on hand, a two-part problem.
First, as mentioned above, we need to talk about the socio-economic disparities found within the police itself. As I mentioned above, there is a hierarchical divide between gazetted and non-gazetted officers in the police. It is a divide that was carefully designed into this institution during colonial rule to ensure that a body of security workers and violence workers (i.e., the rank and file) existed, that would serve the interests of the regime, and protect its political and economic assets. In return for their violence, and in the face of routine financial hardships and professional insecurities, they would then be financially rewarded and politically patronised. They would be presided over by a gazetted cadre that would claim credit for ‘good police work’ and displace blame onto juniors for ‘bad police work’, as needed. This discrepancy within the institution demands attention.
Second, socio-economic disparities within Pakistani society must also be discussed. So long as there are social groups that can be marginalised, criminalised, and framed as ‘security threats’ (the migrant, the refugee, the protester, the political party worker, the displaced citizen, the dissident), our law enforcement agencies will continue serving specific purposes, and in so doing suppress, even silence, through excessive force and coercion, without few—if any—repercussions.
Finally, if we do pin our hopes on reform-oriented packages and programmes, we must realise the importance of true civilian oversight and change that is driven from the bottom-up. Institutional reforms are unlikely to stick without the true representation of civil society in reform agendas, and until these efforts can incorporate localised, even indigenous responses and recommendations for justice, security, and accountability in Pakistan. This means expanding and diversifying the pool of “experts” who advise on reforms and paying attention to the demands of the local movements and pockets of resistance. This will always be an uncomfortable task for our state and its elites, but at least it will break the chain of recycling old “evidence-based” packages that may work well in the developed world, but do not offer a one-size-fits-all formula and may likely be inapplicable in the Pakistani context.
The writer is an Assistant Professor in Criminology, Department of Sociology, University
of Warwick. She is the author of “Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday
Policing in Postcolonial Karachi” (Hurst/Oxford University Press 2022). She researches on
policing, security, and urban violence in Pakistan.
