Police Brutality in the Punjab

Punjab has seen a recent spate of incidents where individuals have face torture and even died in police custody. This has once again brought into question the sort of training police in Punjab undergo. While the inadequacy of police structures in Pakistan is a deep-seated problem, police in Punjab has come under greater scrutiny.

Only in September did Lahori citizen Amjad Ali died from alleged police torture. The case of Salahuddin Ayubi went viral after his death in police custody was first passed off as a heart attack. It was revealed that Ayubi was innocent of the crime he was initially being charged with. Inquiries were carried out into Amjad Ali’s death, after which the SHO and nine others were suspended. Inspector General of Punjab, Retd. Captain Arif Nawaz released a statement, clarifying the police’s prohibition on any form of torture and their responsibilities to provide medical care for individuals in their custody. Read about Murree tragedy.

Since these incidents, Prime Minister Imran Khan approved proposed reforms that would allow greater scrutiny of police actions and greater control of the police by provincial home ministries. Senior officials in the Punjab police have rejected these, deeming them serious bureaucratic hurdles to their work. Yet torture has become a culture within the Punjab police.

Torture is often used to extract confessions, recover stolen items or at the orders of political higher ups. New entrants into the force grow within this culture and hence it becomes normalized within their approaches to police work. Training of the Punjab police does not involve adequate levels of sensitivity training or how to deal with members of the public in high-stress situations. Individuals graduate from police academies with limited knowledge on how to operate with civilians and criminals they arrest. The culture within police academies convinces newer police-men that their approach needs to be centered on aggression towards people in their custody.

It is imperative that the federal and provincial legislatures explicitly move to outlaw and criminalize any form of torture in police custody. Additionally, there should be mechanisms to prevent and punish any generation of false testimonies. Governments should maintain vigilance of senior officers and ensure that they take steps to improve policing in this regard. Simultaneously, the limited resources provided to the police force often compel them to adopt quicker routes such as speedy investigations that fail to provide correct redress. Forced confessions or false testimonies tend to arise when the police is forced to close cases hurriedly. Hence the federal and local government may have to reevaluate its resource allocation with regard to the Punjab police.

There exist several levels to the structures impacting how the police defend the citizenry. Incidents of police brutality severely undermine the faith of the public in the police and in the state. It fails to address high crime levels while also impacting the broad culture of human rights within a state. The police force of ‘Pakistan’s breadbasket’ has to ensure that it is able to protect the citizenry from violent elements from the public and from its own ranks.