LAHORE, Feb 23: The murder of a student on Saturday has once again shown that police pickets pose a threat to people.

The third-year student of Dyal Singh College, riding a motorbike, was allegedly shot dead by a constable when he tried to escape beating after hitting a policeman.

The student’s father, Mushtaq, who runs a shop in the Liberty Market, told Dawn that he could never have imagined that police killed people on pickets. The grief-stricken father said that his son could have been saved had the police taken him to hospital in time.

Though the Chief Capital Police Officer Khwaja Khalid has said that justice would be done, the bereaved family is still in a state of shock. The family believed that perhaps this incident could rid the city of these “death traps”.

Police officials justify the pickets by saying that they are necessary for the safety of people and for catching criminals. However, according to some press reports, the police have seldom succeeded in rounding up criminals on such pickets.

The Lahore High Court has also termed the police pickets illegal and directed the authorities concerned that citizens should not be harassed at such pickets.

Police highups keep issuing press statements that measures are being adopted to ensure that people are not harassed at these pickets but take no practical step to bring about any change in police attitude.

Police pickets are set up in dark corners of the roads. Motorists are often surprised by policemen who seem to appear from nowhere signalling them to stop for a thorough “body and vehicle” search in more than one places in the city.

Motorcyclists are special targets of law-enforcement agents and all of them are treated as criminals and terrorists at such points.

Even the Gowalmandi police claimed that “the victim student” seemed to be a criminal as he had tried to break through the police picket.

Reports suggest that police on pickets are only interested in making money on the pretext of checking vehicles.

The police have set up permanent pickets on almost all important roads and crossings of the provincial metro-polis.

According to commuters, police pickets can serve the nation only if policemen focus on searching suspected vehicles instead of teasing common citizens. They said that in most cases the police mobile squads did not bother signalling or chasing the speeding vehicles.

The police squads assigned duties to patrol the important city roads, also prefer to set up pickets instead.

The police not only search vehicles and check documents but also driving licences. If a driver fails to produce licence, he is threatened with the impounding of his vehicle. — Zulqernain Tahir