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HERE’S an odd thing: my not-so-smart phone has a camera with a six-megapixel capacity, while Karachi’s CCTV cameras operate at two megapixels.
The number of pixels determines the clarity of the image, so the cameras on Karachi’s mean streets are apparently incapable of identifying the suspects they photograph digitally. Thus, the 1,000 or so CCTV cameras installed in Karachi are useless for the purpose of convicting suspects. And the fact that a large percentage of these cheap devices are out of order at any given time doesn’t help either.
In 2010, Rs500 million were allocated to instal these cameras, and in 2014, another Rs846m were sanctioned. However, we were recently informed by the media that a scam worth around Rs200m was uncovered whereby defective cameras were bought by the police.
We bury the fallen cop, mutter a prayer and move on.
While hardly surprising, these sorry facts underline the priority security is accorded by the Sindh government. Considering that Karachi is one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world, one would have expected a more rigorous and sophisticated response.
Another sign of the criminal incompetence of the provincial authorities was the murder of Sabeen Mahmud’s driver. A key witness in the Karachi activist’s high-profile murder, Ghulam Abbas was given no protection despite the massive worldwide publicity the killing received.
For years, there has been endless talk of the need to protect witnesses to violent crimes, and in 2013, Sindh finally passed the Witness Protection Act. But as usual, the government has taken no action to implement it. One reason so few witnesses step forward in cases of ethnic or sectarian terrorism is that they fear for their lives. Over the years, many police officers, witnesses, lawyers and judges have been killed.
Karachi, with a population of around 20 million, has a police force of 27,000. By way of contrast, London, a far more peaceful city with a population of seven million, has 31,000 police officers. Some 30pc of Karachi’s cops are deployed on VIP duties, and while this includes guarding diplomats and judges, it doesn’t leave many to protect the city’s citizens. In actual practice, when we exclude policemen on leave and those undergoing training, we are left with 6,000 cops available at any given time.
Considering the kind of firepower they face every day, the fact that they have very few bullet-proof jackets among them is a disgrace. No wonder so many of them are gunned down by criminals and terrorists. In most countries, if a cop is killed in the line of duty, every resource is deployed to bring the murderer to justice. Here, we bury the fallen cop, mutter a prayer and move on.
So why have successive city and provincial governments been so negligent of our police force? Why hasn’t more attention been paid to their manpower and logistical needs? In part, the police are themselves to blame. Senior officers have ignored the professional requirements of their department for years.
I will never forget the bungled investigation of the attack on my brother Navaid some 17 years ago. He was one of the founder members of Shehri, an NGO set up to tackle, among other environmental issues, the scourge of illegal high-rise buildings in Karachi. Warned several times by the mafia to stop his attempts to block their activities, he was shot in the head and stomach by a target killer in his architectural office one morning. By some miracle, he survived after agonising days of teetering on the brink.
His staff described the killer and an artist produced a composite portrait. When I asked the investigating police officer if he had tried to match the image with those in the police photo archive, he replied there was only an outdated pictorial record maintained by his department. Of course, the hit-man was never caught. I can only hope things have improved since then. Common forensic techniques like finger-printing or looking for footprints at the scene of a crime are still rare.
Basically, our politicians and senior bureaucrats have no interest in improving things. For one, parties like the PPP and the MQM, both of whom share responsibility for the current state of affairs, have been allegedly behind many of the crimes committed in Karachi. They are not therefore keen on pursuing the thugs who kill and rob with impunity.
Against this dismal backdrop of a city in the grip of an unending crime wave, the ongoing operation involving paramilitary Rangers has come as a very welcome injection of steel in the backbone of our law and order enforcement agencies.
Citizens have heaved a sigh of relief at this intervention. And if politicians have squealed with indignation, we all know their invocation of the Constitution rings hollow. After all, they were supposed to provide security, and if they have failed, they need to step aside and let those more capable than them get on with the task of cleaning up Karachi.
Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2015
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