Pakistan: Torture: the police’s language

EDITORIAL:Daily Times

The police in Pakistan does everything except what it is meant to do: enforce the rule of law and prevent crime. In fact, having excelled as spoilers of the citizen’s peace, the force is used to carry out illegal jobs of the politicians and those who matter in the power circles. In a study carried out by the Democratic Commission for Human Development (DCHD) in three districts of Punjab, Faisalabad, Multan and Rahimyar Khan, a not unusual but persistent picture of the police culture has emerged. Bribes, torture, extra-judicial killings, manhandling at the time of arrest, resistance to lodge a First Information Report (FIR), misbehaviour with women, altering investigation processes without informing the complainant are excessively rampant. Combined, this is what makes up the popular misnomer: ‘Thana culture’, something the Chief Minister Punjab Shahbaz Sharif had vowed to dispense with. However, the rise of police encounters in recent years in Punjab certainly builds the case for a broken promise. The underlying theme of the report by DCHD is the third degree torture applied by the police that even makes innocent people confess to crimes they had never committed. Suspects are tortured to either protect the actual criminal or to get away with avoiding arduous investigative processes by cutting them short at the initial stage. People usually avoid going to the police, fearing that it will make things worse for them. Theoretically, in the case of a crime, the police is considered the first step towards the ends of justice. The prevalence of murders for personal revenge, acid-throwing incidents, abusive traditional punishments by panchayats (traditional courts), and the recent phenomenon of setting up of Taliban courts in Karachi are the results of a parallel justice system operating in society. The criminals have become fearless, making their own rules and dividing turf conveniently among different groups in, for example, Karachi, where they are busy killing people for extortion money and other reasons. According to one report presented in the Supreme Court, nearly 400 police officers are running crime rings in Karachi. The question arises that if the police is not doing what it is supposed to do, what then is it doing? Used for personal and political purposes by the higher ups, no attention is paid to its capacity building and neither is there any effective system within the police to convict officers complicit in crime or involved in abusing the law. This is where the rub lies. The only way to remove this anomaly is to ensure mechanisms to hold the police accountable for its misdeeds.