Pakistan has been managing its police system poorly. Never a sincere effort has been made to bring practical reforms in policing. Not even when the need for change — when terrorism had ripped apart the country — was felt the most. High crime and low conviction rates are the direct results of the ineffective rule of law. Judiciary has been blaming the police for destroying evidence and presenting weak cases in courts. Since police have been taking their job nonprofessionally, the prosecution department, which again relies on police, became ineffective over time. The entire judicial system has become redundant and unproductive, one reason why law enforcement agencies have been restoring to extrajudicial killing to eliminate rogue elements.
At the other spectrum, ordinary people too resort to killing each other instead of taking the matter to courts for reprisal. One of the blames laid on policing is political interference. Politicians have been using police to achieve their personal agenda. Karachi has had police running private militias, brothel houses and casinos. That explains why criminal activities and target killing had been a norm in the metropolitan city up until the police-led Rangers operation started. Since the police were required to mop and hide the illegal activates of politicians and other magnates, professionally weak and unscrupulous police officers were preferred over professional officers. Such a situation also demanded a demoralised police force so that motivation to install the rule of law would not have interfered with the nefarious elements’ game plan. Consequently, the police had no structure that would have given impetus to work unconditionally.
In 2002, government decided to reform the police and make it community-oriented. The loopholes that needed immediate closures were a lack of accountability, the practice of making out-of-turn promotions, and absence of reprisal system that motivates the officers to prove their worth. The law, however, failed to attract bureaucrats who had to see it implemented with the result that the situation remained dismal. Some cosmetic improvement had been carried out in Punjab with little or no consequences. Other parts of the country have yet to respond.
The famous National Action Plan (NAP) that was crafted after the Army Public School massacre talks about police reforms. No war on terrorism can be won without the police becoming efficient. Only police could have the ability and the skills to hunt terrorists hiding among ordinary people within a community. Rangers or the army is not trained for such activities. Urban terrorism has taken effect in Pakistan because the police have either become complacent about terrorism or because it had no links with the community. People would rather suffer then go to a police station to lodge complaints. It has been normal for the police to implicate the complainant in the crime instead of taking the accused to the task. Without police reform, NAP will never be able to take flight, and become part of the support system designed to dismantle and destroy structure of terrorists under the Operation Zarb-e-Azb.
One province where some element of sanity in police reform has been observed is Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has introduced the Police Ordinance 2016 with an aim to make the police independent of every pressure be it political or bureaucratic. However, according to Nasir Khan Durrani, the police chief in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in spite of having the operational freedom that enables him to operate without fear and favour, the bureaucratic hurdles restricts his workflow.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police have gone through a capacity building process by introducing six special police schools for investigation, intelligence tactics, explosives handling, public disorder management and information technology. The police have data for nearly a quarter of households, and computerised record of some 700 hotels.
The Dispute Resolution Councils (DRC), Police Access Services, Police Assistance Lines, Public Liaison Councils and Model Reporting Room are some of the initiatives taken in the last two and a half years. These informal dispute resolution systems do not only lessen the burden from an already impoverished and overloaded judicial system, but it also provides speedy justice. One of the DRCs has been reported to settle a dispute pending in court for the last 20 years only in four days.
Since Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been close to both FATA and Afghanistan, the war-hit regions, crime had become a norm rather than an exception there. With the police given the power to lead from the front along with the Antiterrorism Department, a 50 percent reduction was recorded in the incidences of extortion by the end of 2015.
In the nutshell, the objective of the Police Ordinance 2016 has been to introduce people-friendly police, and remove the trust deficit between citizens and law enforcers. Though police in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is striving to achieve these goals, the effort will likely remain ineffective if bureaucracy refuses to make it a success. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa might find removing bureaucratic hurdles in police reform challenging.
The writer is a journalist. She can be reached at [email protected]