Daily Times

When the lights turn off and darkness descends on the streets of Karachi, someone is sure to get killed. For the 23 million people who live in Karachi, crime has become a central part of life, as commonplace as traffic jams and power cuts. The wealthy have armed guards at home; bakeries in elite districts cordon off their doors with metal detectors and weary security guards sitting outside, rifles slung across their shoulders. But the average person cannot afford such protections. It is not just the high rate of crime that makes Karachi unique, but the entanglement of crime with the very highest echelons of politics; gangsters who stand for parliament, the politicians who sanction street killings.

Contrary to popular belief, Karachi’s criminal syndicates are not limited to slums like Lyari but there’s no doubt that crime is especially concentrated in these hotspots. Residents find themselves paying massive amounts of money to ward off the water mafia, which siphons off the main supply to sell it back to people at outrageous rates. The transport mafia, another menace, has repeatedly stymied attempts to build a proper public transportation system. In recent years, militant groups have taken advantage of the city’s lawlessness to establish a foothold, effectively taking control of certain areas.

Indeed, crime has infiltrated every aspect of life in Karachi, morphing into a public health epidemic of sorts but the overstretched and hugely underfunded Karachi police are largely incompetent. Needless to say, our civil institutions are simply too weak to implement law and order-a cursory glance at the police reveals that they haven’t been trained to steer complex situations such as these. The general public doesn’t seem to trust the police either, complicating investigations that require the police to cooperate with insiders who may have crucial information or even take things into their own hands, witnessed by the rise of mob violence in the financial capital. This is not altogether surprising for a country that doesn’t reform its police force since we first inherited it from the British. Modernisation is crucial in the fight against crime; it is high time we stop pitying ourselves and recognize this. *