A SPATE of shocking and high-profile crimes has turned the spotlight once again on the uneven performance of the police forces across the country.

From horrifying murder and sexual abuse to excessive use of force against protesters, there are enormous differences in the crimes and the responses of the relevant police forces, but in no case can the performance of law enforcement be deemed entirely satisfactory. Perhaps now is the time for the federal and provincial governments to convene the heads of the various police forces in the country and discuss what steps can be taken in the short term to improve the performance of the police nationally and which reforms ought to be undertaken for long-term progress.

It will not be easy. Two of the provinces, Sindh and Balochistan, have reverted to the 1861 Police Order, Punjab is still using the Police Order, 2002, a Musharrafian concoction with surprisingly progressive elements, while KP has to implement a commendable set of reforms introduced by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Order, 2016. There are also the roles of other institutions to consider, such as the superior judiciary’s interventions in Sindh and the military establishment’s dominance in Balochistan.

Yet, surely when it comes to keeping young children safe and addressing the menace of extrajudicial killings, there is a level of cooperation that can be found among professional police cadres across the country. Encourage the leaderships to meet, discuss the different experiences in the provinces and seek to identify ways in which the police can better serve their communities — an agenda that transcends myopic political differences ought to be possible to draw up and implement. The failures and lessons of Kasur, for example, could be used to inform other police forces that almost certainly have recorded similar crimes in their jurisdictions.

The KP reform process and the on-ground experience with those reforms in the first few months could be used to inform and educate police leaderships in the other provinces. In an already fraught national political climate that looks set to worsen ahead of the general election, the very idea of cooperation across the provinces and discussing reforms and changes at this late stage in terms of the assemblies may strike some as naïve. But anger across the provinces is an opportunity for the state to try and overcome political hurdles and improve the low quality of policing that the public has come to expect.

Indeed, one of the factors that may be preventing the democratic project from growing in strength is a sense that mainstream political parties are not interested in reforms that could improve the daily life of the citizenry. The justice system, the police and the bureaucracy are the points of contact with the state for most citizens. Address the problems in those areas and the quality of democracy will necessarily improve.

Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2018