On Friday, a large crowd of protesters, most of them from the Mehsud tribe, got together in Karachi’s Sohrab Goth to protest 27-year-old Naqeebullah Mehsud’s killing. Rangers soon appeared on the scene and charged the protesters with batons. Such highhandedness by law enforcement apparatus is reflective of the same attitude that has bred a widespread culture of police encounters. It is ironic that the Rangers’ head in Punjab had been so empathetic that he gave cash handouts to those protesting in Faizabad, but men in the same force in Sindh could not let an aggrieved community exercise its constitutional right. Instead of deploying Rangers, the Sindh Chief Minister should have gone to the site to meet protesters and assure them of an impartial and effective inquiry. Mehsud’s killing in an alleged encounter got highlighted in the mainstream media following outcry on social media. An investigation was subsequently launched with the Supreme Court of Pakistan taking notice and summoning SSP Rao Anwar. The SSP, who is known in Karachi as an ‘encounter specialist’, has maintained that Mehsud was among four militants killed in a shootout with police. Mehsud’s friends and family have rejected that he was affiliated with any militant group. The veracity of these claims will have to be ascertained in a court of law, but Rao Anwar’s notoriety and the pervasive culture of encounters in our police forces should not remain unnoticed anymore. It is imperative that Rao Anwar must be suspended from service with immediate effect so that he cannot influence the inquiry underway against him. And before the media loses interest in this specific case, an across-the-board inquiry under the supervision of parliamentary committees concerned with law and order and internal security should be launched into all such incidents.Based on frequent media reports and studies carried out by organisations like the Human Rights Watch, there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to warrant such an extensive inquiry. Law enforcement officials cannot be allowed to get away with extrajudicial killings on any pretext. There are legal channels available to deal with lawlessness, criminality, as well as militancy. If there are any shortcomings, those should be fixed, instead of bypassing the mechanisms altogether. A law that isn’t respected by the stateitselfcannot be expected to have much respect among ordinary citizens. * Published in Daily Times, January 20th 2018.