Crime control or state criminality? Policing, power and impunity in Punjab – Pakistan

February 2, 2026

According to estimates by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan from October last year, more than 670 fatalities resulted in police encounters in Punjab, “a figure higher than in any other province”.

The script is familiar: while attempting to apprehend or transport a suspect in custody, law enforcement agents come under fire from him and/or his accomplices, “forcing the police to retaliate”, resulting in deaths on the civilian side with almost no casualties — barring perhaps some injuries — reported on the side of state agencies.

Pakistanis are quite well-versed in this story. Some may even have naively assumed that after the extrajudicial killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud and the subsequent high-profile investigation of former Sindh Police SSP Rao Anwar, the tide would turn. It did, to a degree, in Karachi.

An overview of media reports shows that annual encounter killings fell from 500-700 between 2013 and 2015 — the peak years of the Karachi Operation — to 30-60 in the aftermath of Anwar’s trial. While some in the police hailed the ex-Malir SSP and other “encounter specialists” partly for their “daleri” and for navigating class-based hierarchical and structural discrimination within the police — a dynamic I have unpacked in my research — others appeared to have realised that the “encounter policy” had to be abandoned.

Yet it remains a practice too lucrative for violence workers who are keen to operationalise state policy, and a form of state-sanctioned violence considered to be both effective and efficient by political leaders eager to demonstrate governance “successes” through questionably calculated crime statistics.

The supposed “respectable public” (read: the elite), on its part, turns a blind eye to such state criminality as those fatally removed from society and deprived of life — the alleged rapist, murderer, dacoit, robber, gangster, drug dealer — are perceived worthy of such punishment, for whom the rule of law and legal formalities and technicalities need not apply.

For policymakers, law enforcers, and the public, collectively, these dynamics are easier to accept when a broader political climate has prioritised a “hard state” approach towards all forms of internal and external “threats”.

Police Order (Amendment) Ordinance 2025 to include operational and investigative police work, legal work, intelligence and data collection through varied forms of surveillance.

An overly empowered specialised police unit, created to realise the chief minister’s “zero crime policy”, the CCD has been given a free hand to enforce zero tolerance policing. Its performance is reminiscent of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Federal Security Force, and beyond Pakistan, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad in Nigeria, and the Rapid Action Battalion in Bangladesh — examples of elite policing units designed to “eliminate” serious and organised crime, terrorism, and other national or internal security threats, including political opposition, while significantly breaching human rights and civil liberties.

It has been estimated that between January and June 2025, more than 400 suspected criminals were killed in over 800 CCD encounters. According to estimates by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan from October last year, more than 670 fatalities resulted in police encounters in Punjab, “a figure higher than in any other province”. We are told the victims have included dacoits, drug dealers, gang members, child abusers, sexual harassers, etc.

As per a petition filed in the Lahore High Court last month, 1,100 citizens were killed in such encounters since the formation of the CCD. It states that “fake encounters are being used as an alternative to the criminal justice system”, and are thus illegal and unconstitutional. The application followed several statements and judgments by the superior courts last year, during which government officials, including the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and the Punjab Police chiefs, were summoned and directed to ensure that constitutional protections are afforded.

Even though the FIA is legally required to investigate deaths and torture in police custody, as of November last year, not a single investigation has reportedly taken place into the CCD’s reported encounter killings.

The department, meanwhile, rejects claims of fake or staged encounters, with their spokesperson arguing: “These criminals do not welcome us with flowers, they shoot at us the moment they see us … during these operations, if a few individuals are killed, it accounts for not even one per cent of our overall activities” (emphasis added).

The final month of 2025 saw dozens of such “few individuals” reportedly killed in encounters by CCD personnel, shortly after the LHC petition was filed. On a single day, in a “series of encounters” across the province, at least 23 suspected drug dealers were killed, with at least 16 in Gujranwala alone. The figure alone should set the alarm bells ringing.

Importantly, the persistence of police encounter killings — and the lack of transparency, investigations, or accountability around them — indicates criminality on the part of the state, the complacency of the “respectable public”, and the limits of institutional reform.

Penny Green and Tony Ward, challenges conventional criminological and legal perspectives that remain focused on state-centric definitions of what constitutes a crime, seldom holding states accountable for their own criminality.

Green and Ward define state crime as “state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights”, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, torture, state terrorism, and even police violence. State crime scholarship offers a critical lens that helps assess how states avoid their responsibility to protect citizens and breach human rights laws and international frameworks.

State law enforcement agencies are empowered with the monopoly to use legitimate force, equipped with the discretion to decide when and under what circumstances the deployment of such force becomes necessary. In other words, coercion or the use of force is the defining feature of modern policing. Also, a core task of modern policing systems is preserving the status quo and maintaining a class-based social order.

Substantial research has now established that in our postcolonial world, policing has traditionally been a militarised project (despite its “civilian” descriptives); that the idea that the police enforce the law through public consent is outdated; and, extrajudicial police violence cannot be attributed to a single person or a single elite police unit, but rather is usually symptomatic of regime-centric considerations.

Relatedly, when there are political incentives to use excessive force — following the declaration of a war, a state of emergency, or a national security threat — the police are unlikely to exercise restraint. In other words, when a government decides to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to crime (which the state itself defines), it also incentivises law enforcement agents to engage in zero-tolerance policing, which almost always invokes the extrajudicial use of force.

In such scenarios, the state is complicit in fostering an environment in which police encounter killings can endure. By extension, therefore, a case may be made that the persistence of police encounter killings is an example of state organisational deviancy that violates human rights. That is, a crime on the part of the state (unless established otherwise).

Beyond the state and its agents, we must also question the legitimacy that such practices draw from Pakistan’s social structure. In their book, Green and Ward argue that the “respectable public” seldom deals directly with the police and rarely witnesses the ‘uglier’ side of policing that the working classes are subjected to.

When presented with narratives of “eliminating threats”, the respectable public is likely to give the police the benefit of the doubt. The respectable public is also less likely to witness excessive police violence; equipped with legal and political power, they are more likely to challenge police violence and sanction law enforcement agents should they be subjected to coercive behaviour. Privilege and power may work in tandem to protect the respectable public from being subjected to such forms of repression.

The so-called “rough public”, on the other hand (described as “wild”, “uncivilised”, “dispossessed”), the working class — who must be kept at sufficient distance from the respectables — are the ones more likely to bear the brunt of police coercion. Frequently invisibilised from the gated spaces and gazes of the respectable public, state deviancy against the “rough public” is often easy to ignore, and their victimisation can be narrated as: “inn ke saath aisa hi hona chahiye (this is exactly what should happen with them)”.

State criminality in the form of extrajudicial police killings is not just a product of decisions undertaken by our political elite; it is, in fact, a result of the direct or indirect complacency of the ‘respectable public’ who support the repression of marginalised and ‘othered’ populations.

In Pakistan, entire communities have been dehumanised and even demonised based on their ethnic identities, histories, and political demands, which thereby leads sections of the society into justifying state violence against these groups.

Thus, the manifestation of police militarisation and zero-tolerance policing in the form of extrajudicial police killings is a collective product of state- and elite-sanctioned repression. It is no surprise, therefore, that police encounters have been widely popular in Pakistan’s history and imagination, and indeed across South Asia, legitimised through religious and cultural narratives of morality, dharma, or securitised chronicles that present select communities as ‘our internal enemies’. The place and popularity of Punjab’s Crime Control Department must be understood against these socio-political processes, and Pakistan’s classist social structure more broadly.

Separately, we must also ask: what sort of police organisational reform is being implemented in Punjab? This inquiry is not limited to legal reform in the shape of amendments to the Police Order, which call for independent and impartial oversight, or independent investigations into police violence. Beyond this, substantial transformative changes are taking place in Punjab — as in other parts of Pakistan — through the digitalisation of policing.

The PML-N championed police digitalisation in the province, promoting the expansions of various smart policing projects that aim to make the force more operationally effective and aid in its investigative capacity. The goal is to improve public safety and security in Punjab through tech-driven surveillance. This digitalisation mission has extended to the CCD, which has been equipped with a technical wing to maintain databases, digital repositories of gang members, facilitators, family members, and more, as well as access to call data record, locations, audio and video surveillance, geo-fencing, and more.

In theory, police digitalisation should make policing more efficient, effective, and transparent, reducing reliance upon extra-legal and extra-judicial violence on the part of law enforcement agents. Yet, open-source data and media reports indicate that CCD encounter killings have often taken place in cities where such projects have been rolled out. These digitalisation initiatives geographically overlap with CCD encounters, including in Lahore, Multan, Gujranwala, Sargodha, Sialkot, and Bahawalpur.

The overlap between such digital surveillance infrastructure and the heightened use of police extrajudicial violence is interesting, to say the least. It doesn’t necessarily prove that individual incidents have taken place where Punjab Safe Cities Authority cameras are present; this overlap is difficult to establish in the absence of reliable CCD data. But we can still ask: Is the state’s digital surveillance technology extending into spaces where such encounters take place? If yes, then can such surveillance footage be made public if and when independent investigations into police killings are initiated?

Transformational changes in law enforcement through technological advancements, if regulated properly, must amount to greater police accountability. Even though international research on police digitalisation (such as the use of body-worn cameras, CCTV cameras, and other predictive policing tools) remains inconclusive — there is no convincing correlation between digitalisation and a reduction in police violence (yet) — these tools may deter individual officers from abusing discretion. Beyond this, state policies, social structure, perceptions, attitudes, and police institutional culture remain dominant drivers of excessive use of force.

Finally, the continued reliance upon this practice shows a criminal justice system in deep crisis. The persistence of this practice — on the part of the state and law enforcers — signals a profound lack of trust and faith by legal authorities in the very judicial and legal processes that they are meant to uphold. Rather than strengthening the investigation, prosecution, and adjudication, the state has normalised lethal jugaad that bypass constitutional safeguards.

Article 9 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life and liberty, particularly when constitutional scrutiny is disallowed or avoided, and Article 10A, which guarantees the right to a fair trial and due process. They also show a disregard for the Police Order; under this law, police use of lethal force must be independently reviewed. Failure to investigate, register a first information report in the aftermath of a killing in police custody, or conduct a judicial inquiry into the killing, are all violations of fundamental rights.

In 2022, the government also passed the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act, which criminalises torture, custodial rape, and custodial death. Yet, many encounters take place while the suspect is in custody, as the police designate the killing of a suspect as ‘self-defence’, conveniently avoiding the application of the law.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Zaryab Khan case in November 2025 further underscores the unconstitutionality of this practice by holding that Khan’s custodial death in Dera Ghazi Khan in FIA’s custody violated the Constitution. “The Constitution imposes a duty upon the State to protect the right to life of every citizen and to prevent custodial violence and killings,” the SC reasoned.

Justice Mandokhail emphasised that “the constitutional guarantees against illegal detention, arrest, brutality, torture, and extrajudicial killings in any form are bedrock legal and fundamental principles enshrined in the Constitution” and “the right to life has been categorised as the supreme human right, which is codified in every major human rights treaty”.

While the case exposed entrenched police impunity, it also revealed something more troubling: persistent, unchecked extrajudicial killings are not merely instances of misconduct or institutional failure but indicate criminality on the part of the state itself.

Pakistan’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) reinforce this conclusion. Having ratified the treaty, Pakistan is bound to prohibit the arbitrary deprivation of life and ensure impartial investigations into state-caused deaths. In spite of this, no impartial investigations are carried out, indicating the systematic lack of accountability on the part of the state.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that in July last year, the Lahore High Court directed the police chief of Punjab to review the incidents of encounter killings by the CCD. In December again, the court issued notices to the Punjab government and the chief of police. To what extent these interventions restrain the CCD remains to be seen. For now, state officials typically narrate the script mentioned at the beginning of this article to the media, which is printed or reported with little independent questioning.

In sum, the police violence raging in Punjab is a form of state organisational deviance that violates fundamental human rights to a degree that could be framed as criminality on the part of the state.

While we celebrate reductions in crime rates as successful manifestations of a ‘zero-crime policy’, we must critically re-evaluate the structures of colonial-era policing and the cultures of legality that we are cementing in Pakistan, bolstering the militarisation of the criminal justice system, at the cost of radical institutional reforms that the country’s criminal justice system desperately needs.

Is the “respectable public” going to wait for another high-profile killing that tarnishes the country’s domestic and international reputation before we can openly challenge the legitimacy of this practice? Will we remain agnostic to the legal restrictions that are imposed upon arbitrary state power?