HOW the basic questions have ceased to be. There was once a time when any crime involving firearms would be linked to the availability of weapons in the area and their supply line. The severing of the line was considered essential for putting curbs on arms. There would be calls to stop the smuggling in of weapons and once every few years someone would announce a campaign for the voluntary surrendering of unlicensed guns in a city.

With all their legendary tales about fleet-footed criminals nonchalantly escaping the police nets those were very simple times. The police would frequently fail, as they do now, but at least they ‘appeared’ to be applying methods much of which made sense to the people forever watching them with interest. It was not like the current times when there are few things that are givens and are not supposed to be challenged or which do not quite encourage an attempt at improvement.

Weapons are a reality, a given that we seem to be resigned to. No one today wants to waste their time in finding out how and from where they are supplied for proud, unbridled brandishing in the towns and villages of the country. The reality is there and it can only be combated by more weapons, this time in the hands of those threatened by the already armed.

A car driver tries to honk his way past a cluster of motorcyclists. The bike riders are incensed by the noise; one of them takes out a pistol and shoots the car driver dead then and there. In the investigation of the case no one would be bothered about tracing the origins of the gun. In Karachi, they might still want to establish the make of the gun; that could maybe help them identify the group known for using the brand or the calibre. Elsewhere it is no more fashionable to give space to such details as who made the gun, where it might have come from, why it appears to be so easily available to those out to kill.

How will the state regain the trust of the people without sharing basic information about basic current issues?

The list of the ‘givens’ which begins at the very basic level of crime is easily expanded. The frequency of a crime leads to a kind of routine setting in in the works of investigators who are no more easily pushed by the repeats. Not a week passes by in Punjab without news about the kidnapping of children. Quite frequently the conclusion is tragic, and many of the kidnapped children have been killed by their captors.

But the horrific tales that these incidents provide the neighbourhoods with have failed to shake the authorities into launching any grand awareness drive. It is as if the police are resigned to these kidnappings, which are mostly carried out by people close to the victim. The media has also failed to create pressure, limiting itself to writing a few emotional lines here and there and whenever possible showing footage of a kidnapper running away with an infant from an unguarded hospital.

These things, we are told, happen. The bigger the city, the more likely the occurrence of such incidents, and therefore, there is always a reason for the majority to thank their lucky stars. It could well have been them suffering at the hands of criminals who had to be around and the less interested officials who can only be effective to an extent. They have so much else to deal with, not least vicious of them the monster of terrorism.

Only if the law enforcers were able to come up with occasional authoritative accounts about these high-profile crimes and their resolution it might have helped fight the public perception about their poor capabilities. The fact is that regular reports about these high-profile crimes add to the public distrust of the investigator who is present in their midst. The impression is that the solution has been either arrived at through some direct intervention and dealing by those who had been targeted by the criminals, or it has been provided by a supra force that had left our usual busybody policemen totally redundant.

There is a counterterrorism department at work that is moving fast to ensure that the rest of the police will soon lose whatever respect it could still command from the people. This force has not so far shown too much interest in addressing the basic questions and it seems to be working fast — and with aplomb — in proving to the people just how inefficient the police can generally be. If the idea was to give the entire police force a vision and a map to combat the unusual and fast-growing menace of terrorism the message has somehow not got through.

One reason for that is the absence of a visible will to not override the existing system but take every part in it along in an effective way towards the objective. Indeed, the success of the supra scheme is in a way tied to the furnishing of greater evidence of just how weak and inefficient it has turned out to be.

There is obviously an argument that brings out just how necessary it is for the crime solvers in charge to keep their operations away from the public gaze. The cases are too sensitive and sharing of information may compromise the investigation in times of intricate, never-ending linkages between crime and criminals. Yet the problem remains: how is the state going to move on the path of regaining the trust of the people without sharing some basic information about the basic, current issues?

The joyous scenes marking the return of Shahbaz Taseer this week must not in any way take the focus away from the basic reality. A lot has to be done to look this reality in the eye. There are reports that Shahbaz was kept at a house in a Lahore housing society and that he was kidnapped by students of a university in the city. That’s where the basic probe should be instead of everyone dismissing it as an unavoidable happening.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2016