The script is acquainted: whereas trying to apprehend or transport a suspect in custody, regulation enforcement brokers come below hearth from him and/or his accomplices, “forcing the police to retaliate”, leading to deaths on the civilian aspect with nearly no casualties — barring maybe some accidents — reported on the aspect of state businesses.
Pakistanis are fairly well-versed on this story. Some might even have naively assumed that after the extrajudicial killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud and the following high-profile investigation of former Sindh Police SSP Rao Anwar, the tide would flip. It did, to a level, in Karachi.
An summary of media reviews reveals that annual encounter killings fell from 500-700 between 2013 and 2015 — the height years of the Karachi Operation — to 30-60 within the aftermath of Anwar’s trial. Whereas some within the police hailed the ex-Malir SSP and different “encounter specialists” partly for his or her “daleri” and for navigating class-based hierarchical and structural discrimination inside the police — a dynamic I’ve unpacked in my research — others appeared to have realised that the “encounter coverage” needed to be deserted.
But it stays a apply too profitable for violence employees who’re eager to operationalise state coverage, and a type of state-sanctioned violence thought-about to be each efficient and environment friendly by political leaders desirous to show governance “successes” by questionably calculated crime statistics.
The supposed “respectable public” (learn: the elite), on its half, turns a blind eye to such state criminality as these fatally faraway from society and disadvantaged of life — the alleged rapist, assassin, dacoit, robber, gangster, drug supplier — are perceived worthy of such punishment, for whom the rule of regulation and authorized formalities and technicalities needn’t apply.
For policymakers, regulation enforcers, and the general public, collectively, these dynamics are simpler to simply accept when a broader political local weather has prioritised a “arduous state” strategy in direction of all types of inside and exterior “threats”.
Zero-tolerance policing
As of early 2025, the Crime Management Division (CCD) of Punjab Police and its political patrons have adopted a tried and examined script. Established by an government order following the provincial cupboard’s approval final 12 months, the division’s powers and mandate have been enshrined into regulation by the Police Order (Modification) Ordinance 2025 to incorporate operational and investigative police work, authorized work, intelligence and information assortment by diversified types of surveillance.
An excessively empowered specialised police unit, created to understand the chief minister’s “zero crime coverage”, the CCD has been given a free hand to implement zero tolerance policing. Its efficiency is paying homage to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Federal Safety Power, and past Pakistan, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad in Nigeria, and the Rapid Action Battalion in Bangladesh — examples of elite policing models designed to “get rid of” severe and organised crime, terrorism, and different nationwide or inside safety threats, together with political opposition, whereas considerably breaching human rights and civil liberties.
It has been estimated that between January and June 2025, greater than 400 suspected criminals had been killed in over 800 CCD encounters. In response to estimates by the Human Rights Fee of Pakistan from October final 12 months, greater than 670 fatalities resulted in police encounters in Punjab, “a determine increased than in some other province”. We’re informed the victims have included dacoits, drug sellers, gang members, baby abusers, sexual harassers, and so on.
As per a petition filed within the Lahore Excessive Courtroom final month, 1,100 residents had been killed in such encounters because the formation of the CCD. It states that “pretend encounters are getting used as an alternative choice to the prison justice system”, and are thus unlawful and unconstitutional. The applying adopted a number of statements and judgments by the superior courts final 12 months, throughout which authorities officers, together with the Federal Investigation Company (FIA) and the Punjab Police chiefs, had been summoned and directed to make sure that constitutional protections are afforded.
Although the FIA is legally required to analyze deaths and torture in police custody, as of November final 12 months, not a single investigation has reportedly taken place into the CCD’s reported encounter killings.
The division, in the meantime, rejects claims of faux or staged encounters, with their spokesperson arguing: “These criminals don’t welcome us with flowers, they shoot at us the second they see us … throughout these operations, if a few people are killed, it accounts for not even one per cent of our general actions” (emphasis added).
The ultimate month of 2025 noticed dozens of such “few people” reportedly killed in encounters by CCD personnel, shortly after the LHC petition was filed. On a single day, in a “sequence of encounters” throughout the province, no less than 23 suspected drug sellers had been killed, with no less than 16 in Gujranwala alone. The determine alone ought to set the alarm bells ringing.
Importantly, the persistence of police encounter killings — and the dearth of transparency, investigations, or accountability round them — signifies criminality on the a part of the state, the complacency of the “respectable public”, and the bounds of institutional reform.
Police violence: a state crime
An rising sub-field of crucial criminology, led by Penny Green and Tony Ward, challenges typical criminological and authorized views that stay centered on state-centric definitions of what constitutes a criminal offense, seldom holding states accountable for their very own criminality.
Inexperienced and Ward outline state crime as “state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights”, reminiscent of genocide, crimes towards humanity, torture, state terrorism, and even police violence. State crime scholarship gives a crucial lens that helps assess how states keep away from their accountability to guard residents and breach human rights legal guidelines and worldwide frameworks.
State regulation enforcement businesses are empowered with the monopoly to make use of legit pressure, outfitted with the discretion to determine when and below what circumstances the deployment of such pressure turns into vital. In different phrases, coercion or using pressure is the defining characteristic of recent policing. Additionally, a core process of recent policing techniques is preserving the established order and sustaining a class-based social order.
Substantial analysis has now established that in our postcolonial world, policing has historically been a militarised project (regardless of its “civilian” descriptives); that the concept that the police implement the regulation by public consent is outdated; and, extrajudicial police violence can’t be attributed to a single particular person or a single elite police unit, however quite is normally symptomatic of regime-centric considerations.
Relatedly, when there are political incentives to make use of extreme pressure — following the declaration of a conflict, a state of emergency, or a nationwide safety risk — the police are unlikely to train restraint. In different phrases, when a authorities decides to undertake a zero-tolerance strategy to crime (which the state itself defines), it additionally incentivises regulation enforcement brokers to have interaction in zero-tolerance policing, which just about all the time invokes the extrajudicial use of pressure.
In such eventualities, the state is complicit in fostering an setting through which police encounter killings can endure. By extension, due to this fact, a case could also be made that the persistence of police encounter killings is an instance of state organisational deviancy that violates human rights. That’s, a criminal offense on the a part of the state (except established in any other case).
State- and elite-sanctioned repression
Past the state and its brokers, we should additionally query the legitimacy that such practices draw from Pakistan’s social construction. Of their e-book, Inexperienced and Ward argue that the “respectable public” seldom offers straight with the police and infrequently witnesses the ‘uglier’ aspect of policing that the working lessons are subjected to.
When offered with narratives of “eliminating threats”, the respectable public is probably going to provide the police the advantage of the doubt. The respectable public can be much less prone to witness extreme police violence; outfitted with authorized and political energy, they’re extra prone to problem police violence and sanction regulation enforcement brokers ought to they be subjected to coercive behaviour. Privilege and energy may match in tandem to guard the respectable public from being subjected to such types of repression.
The so-called “tough public”, alternatively (described as “wild”, “uncivilised”, “dispossessed”), the working class — who have to be stored at adequate distance from the respectables — are those extra prone to bear the brunt of police coercion. Incessantly invisibilised from the gated areas and gazes of the respectable public, state deviancy towards the “tough public” is usually simple to disregard, and their victimisation may be narrated as: “inn ke saath aisa hello hona chahiye (that is precisely what ought to occur with them)”.
State criminality within the type of extrajudicial police killings isn’t just a product of selections undertaken by our political elite; it’s, in truth, a results of the direct or oblique complacency of the ‘respectable public’ who help the repression of marginalised and ‘othered’ populations.
In Pakistan, total communities have been dehumanised and even demonised based mostly on their ethnic identities, histories, and political calls for, which thereby leads sections of the society into justifying state violence towards these teams.
Thus, the manifestation of police militarisation and zero-tolerance policing within the type of extrajudicial police killings is a collective product of state- and elite-sanctioned repression. It’s no shock, due to this fact, that police encounters have been broadly standard in Pakistan’s historical past and creativeness, and certainly throughout South Asia, legitimised by spiritual and cultural narratives of morality, dharma, or securitised chronicles that current choose communities as ‘our inside enemies’. The place and recognition of Punjab’s Crime Management Division have to be understood towards these socio-political processes, and Pakistan’s classist social construction extra broadly.
The boundaries of institutional reform
Individually, we should additionally ask: what kind of police organisational reform is being applied in Punjab? This inquiry will not be restricted to authorized reform within the form of amendments to the Police Order, which name for impartial and neutral oversight, or impartial investigations into police violence. Past this, substantial transformative modifications are happening in Punjab — as in different components of Pakistan — by the digitalisation of policing.
The PML-N championed police digitalisation within the province, selling the expansions of assorted good policing initiatives that goal to make the pressure extra operationally efficient and support in its investigative capability. The purpose is to enhance public security and safety in Punjab by tech-driven surveillance. This digitalisation mission has prolonged to the CCD, which has been outfitted with a technical wing to take care of databases, digital repositories of gang members, facilitators, relations, and extra, in addition to entry to name information document, places, audio and video surveillance, geo-fencing, and extra.
In idea, police digitalisation ought to make policing extra environment friendly, efficient, and clear, decreasing reliance upon extra-legal and extra-judicial violence on the a part of regulation enforcement brokers. But, open-source information and media reviews point out that CCD encounter killings have typically taken place in cities the place such initiatives have been rolled out. These digitalisation initiatives geographically overlap with CCD encounters, together with in Lahore, Multan, Gujranwala, Sargodha, Sialkot, and Bahawalpur.
The overlap between such digital surveillance infrastructure and the heightened use of police extrajudicial violence is attention-grabbing, to say the least. It doesn’t essentially show that particular person incidents have taken place the place Punjab Protected Cities Authority cameras are current; this overlap is tough to determine within the absence of dependable CCD information. However we will nonetheless ask: Is the state’s digital surveillance expertise extending into areas the place such encounters happen? If sure, then can such surveillance footage be made public if and when impartial investigations into police killings are initiated?
Transformational modifications in regulation enforcement by technological developments, if regulated correctly, should quantity to higher police accountability. Although worldwide analysis on police digitalisation (reminiscent of using body-worn cameras, CCTV cameras, and different predictive policing instruments) stays inconclusive — there isn’t a convincing correlation between digitalisation and a discount in police violence (but) — these instruments might deter particular person officers from abusing discretion. Past this, state insurance policies, social construction, perceptions, attitudes, and police institutional tradition stay dominant drivers of extreme use of pressure.
Police violence, state crime and human rights
Lastly, the continued reliance upon this apply reveals a prison justice system in deep disaster. The persistence of this apply — on the a part of the state and regulation enforcers — alerts a profound lack of belief and religion by authorized authorities within the very judicial and authorized processes that they’re meant to uphold. Reasonably than strengthening the investigation, prosecution, and adjudication, the state has normalised deadly jugaad that bypass constitutional safeguards.
Clearly, encounters are unconstitutional. They violate Article 9 of the Constitution, which ensures the best to life and liberty, notably when constitutional scrutiny is disallowed or prevented, and Article 10A, which ensures the best to a good trial and due course of. Additionally they present a disregard for the Police Order; below this regulation, police use of deadly pressure have to be independently reviewed. Failure to analyze, register a primary data report within the aftermath of a killing in police custody, or conduct a judicial inquiry into the killing, are all violations of basic rights.
In 2022, the federal government additionally handed the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act, which criminalises torture, custodial rape, and custodial dying. But, many encounters happen whereas the suspect is in custody, because the police designate the killing of a suspect as ‘self-defence’, conveniently avoiding the appliance of the regulation.
The Supreme Courtroom’s ruling within the Zaryab Khan case in November 2025 additional underscores the unconstitutionality of this apply by holding that Khan’s custodial dying in Dera Ghazi Khan in FIA’s custody violated the Structure. “The Structure imposes an obligation upon the State to guard the best to life of each citizen and to forestall custodial violence and killings,” the SC reasoned.
Justice Mandokhail emphasised that “the constitutional ensures towards unlawful detention, arrest, brutality, torture, and extrajudicial killings in any kind are bedrock authorized and basic rules enshrined within the Structure” and “the best to life has been categorised because the supreme human proper, which is codified in each main human rights treaty”.
Whereas the case uncovered entrenched police impunity, it additionally revealed one thing extra troubling: persistent, unchecked extrajudicial killings should not merely cases of misconduct or institutional failure however point out criminality on the a part of the state itself.
Pakistan’s obligations below the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) reinforce this conclusion. Having ratified the treaty, Pakistan is sure to ban the arbitrary deprivation of life and guarantee neutral investigations into state-caused deaths. Despite this, no neutral investigations are carried out, indicating the systematic lack of accountability on the a part of the state.
It’s unsurprising, due to this fact, that in July final 12 months, the Lahore Excessive Courtroom directed the police chief of Punjab to evaluation the incidents of encounter killings by the CCD. In December once more, the courtroom issued notices to the Punjab authorities and the chief of police. To what extent these interventions restrain the CCD stays to be seen. For now, state officers usually narrate the script talked about initially of this text to the media, which is printed or reported with little impartial questioning.
In sum, the police violence raging in Punjab is a type of state organisational deviance that violates basic human rights to a level that might be framed as criminality on the a part of the state.
Whereas we have fun reductions in crime charges as profitable manifestations of a ‘zero-crime coverage’, we should critically re-evaluate the constructions of colonial-era policing and the cultures of legality that we’re cementing in Pakistan, bolstering the militarisation of the prison justice system, at the price of radical institutional reforms that the nation’s prison justice system desperately wants.
Is the “respectable public” going to attend for an additional high-profile killing that tarnishes the nation’s home and worldwide fame earlier than we will brazenly problem the legitimacy of this apply? Will we stay agnostic to the authorized restrictions which might be imposed upon arbitrary state energy?
