In January 2019, on a Pakistani highway near Sahiwal, three children watched their parents and sister die at the hands of the state. The police officers who pulled the trigger believed they were stopping criminals. They were wrong. The parents were innocent, the identification mistaken, the encounter irreversible. What those children witnessed was not merely a policing failure; it was the collapse of the promise that the law exists to protect, not terrorise.
This is not an isolated tragedy. It is the predictable outcome of a policing system that has learned to value speed over certainty, force over investigation, and obedience over judgment. In Pakistan’s most populous province, Punjab, policing today sits at a dangerous intersection where authority has outpaced accountability and power has detached itself from legitimacy.
A police force is not merely a uniformed service; it is the most intimate expression of the state’s character. Where the police are trusted, the state is perceived as lawful. Where they are feared, the state is experienced as predatory. By that measure, the police in Pakistan face a crisis that cannot be resolved by new buildings, vehicles, or slogans. Its problem is structural.
Over the past decade, Transparency International’s National Corruption Perception Surveys have consistently ranked the police among Pakistan’s two most corrupt public institutions, alongside land administration. In Punjab, initiatives such as model police stations and police service centres have reduced some forms of petty bribery, but public confidence remains stubbornly low. Surveys conducted by Gallup Pakistan and the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency suggest that fewer than one-third of citizens believe police act impartially in politically sensitive cases. Even fewer believe that a constable who refuses an illegal order will be protected by the institution. This is not a moral indictment of individual officers; it is evidence of a system designed to fail its own people.
The roots of this failure lie in a colonial architecture that has survived almost intact since the Police Act of 1861. The logic of that system was control, not consent. Today, it still rewards visibility of power over quality of investigation and obedience over professional judgment. The station house officer, who effectively determines how the law is experienced by ordinary citizens, is usually a non-gazetted officer operating under intense political pressure, informal financial expectations, and almost no institutional insulation. Above him sits a gazetted officer-often from the elite civil services-rotated every one or two years across provinces and cultures he barely knows.
Every society that has successfully reformed its police did so by redefining power as responsibility.
This rotational civil service model may have merit in general administration, but in policing, it is corrosive. Law enforcement is not abstract governance; it is intimate authority. In the United Kingdom, police officers begin as constables and rise through the ranks within the same professional culture. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner is not parachuted in from another service; he is shaped by decades of operational accountability. Even magistrates and jurors are required to live within defined distances of their jurisdictions, ensuring cultural familiarity and moral proximity to the consequences of their decisions. British policing still rests on Sir Robert Peel’s 19th-century principle that the police are the public and the public are the police.
India, despite its own struggles with politicisation and encounter culture, retains one structural advantage Pakistan lacks. Indian Police Service officers spend their careers within a single state cadre, acquiring linguistic fluency, cultural intelligence, and institutional memory. Delhi Police operates with roughly one police station for every 90,000 residents. Lahore, a city of comparable scale and complexity, operates with far fewer stations per capita, overstretching personnel and incentivising shortcuts. Dubai has gone further, separating enforcement visibility from investigative depth and investing heavily in forensic certainty to reduce discretionary abuse. Saudi Arabia, despite its centralised political system, enforces strict internal discipline; misuse of uniform or protocol invites swift institutional consequences, not public relations management.
In Punjab, the most damaging distortion occurs at the very first step of criminal justice. The First Information Report, legally intended as a simple record of information, has been transformed into an arrest warrant in practice. Police avoid registering FIRs to control statistics or extract rents, while complainants view registration as a victory rather than the beginning of due process. Arrest substitutes for investigation, torture substitutes for evidence, and confession replaces forensic proof. Unlike the United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service, Pakistan’s prosecution system lacks independence and authority. Prosecutors are often under-resourced, undertrained, and structurally subordinate to the same political pressures that influence police. Cases collapse in court not because judges are hostile, but because investigations are compromised from inception.
The tragedy is that Pakistan knows how to do better. The Punjab Forensic Science Agency once demonstrated how DNA analysis, ballistics, and digital forensics could dramatically improve conviction quality while reducing custodial abuse. Police service centres showed that public interaction could be civilised. These successes, however, remain isolated islands in a sea of institutional inertia, unable to change incentives upstream.
The recent rise of specialised crime control units and public applause for police encounters signals a deeper moral regression. Societies tempted by instant justice eventually pay for it with institutional decay. Encounters eliminate suspects, but they also eliminate truth. Each extrajudicial killing may win momentary approval, but it corrodes the constitutional promise that no life shall be taken without due process. Nations do not collapse only because of crime; they collapse when the state itself normalises lawlessness.
Equally neglected is the welfare of the ordinary constable. A constable working sixteen-hour shifts, living in substandard barracks, under constant financial stress and political threat, cannot reasonably be expected to act as a neutral guardian of the law. When senior officers enjoy protocol vehicles, discretionary authority, and social insulation, while the foot soldier bears operational risk without institutional protection, resentment becomes policy. The misuse of blue lights, the culture of intimidation, and the performative display of weapons are not mere behavioural lapses; they are symptoms of a hierarchy that has replaced professionalism with spectacle.
Real reform cannot be cosmetic. It must be structural and enforceable. Investigation must be institutionally separated from enforcement, staffed by professionals trained in forensic science and evidence law, and insulated from local political pressures. FIR registration should be automated and time-bound, removing discretion at the point of entry. Prosecutors must be empowered to direct investigations, not merely receive files. Police postings should prioritise local familiarity, longer tenures, and career progression based on domain expertise rather than administrative compliance.
Pakistan’s Police Order of 2002 envisioned independent public safety and police complaints commissions. Their dilution represents legislative failure, not operational resistance. When was the last serious debate in Parliament on custodial deaths or prosecution quality? Parliamentary oversight of policing has largely been replaced by silence, and silence is not neutrality; it is abdication.
Restoring public confidence will require choices that are visible, uncomfortable, and irreversible. Officers who refuse illegal orders must be protected, not punished. Political interference must be criminalised, not normalised. Data on custodial deaths, encounter killings, FIR refusals, and prosecution outcomes must be publicly disclosed and independently audited. Technology should be used not to surveil citizens, but to restrain power through body cameras, digital evidence chains, and transparent case tracking.
Every society that has successfully reformed its police did so by redefining power as responsibility. Britain learned this over centuries; the United States is learning it painfully through litigation and reform mandates, and countries like the United Arab Emirates learned it by aligning prestige with professionalism rather than fear. Pakistan lacks neither capable officers nor reform ideas. What it lacks is the political courage to surrender control in exchange for legitimacy.
A state that governs through fear eventually loses both fear and respect. A police force that commands obedience but not trust enforces order without justice. Pakistan now stands at a choice point. Reform is no longer a question of ambition but of survival. The honour of the uniform and the legitimacy of the state itself will depend not on how much power the police wield, but on how wisely they restrain it.
The writer is a political economist and policy strategist shaping discourse on principled leadership, economic sovereignty, and long-term governance.