Police torture: A product of Pakistan’s authoritarian political values? – Prism

About a decade ago, in March 2010, newspapers crammed with articles on police torture following an incident in Chiniot in which suspects accused of street crimes were stripped, tortured and publicly humiliated by police in front of a police station .

The videos of the incident led to public protest. A suo motu It was noted. The Supreme Court ordered the Punjab government to "close the private torture cells directed by the police, make drastic changes in police training manuals, maintain strict discipline and hold high-ranking police officers accountable, including the inspector general." .

The media reported that Punjab police handled about 150 torture cells in Lahore, outside the facilities of police stations, where police officers generally employed five methods of torture: physical, hygienic, deprivation, psychology and humiliation.

The police felt attacked, embarrassed and demoralized. The then inspector general of the Punjab police said the public was "abusing" [the police] more than the Indian army. "The Supreme Court instructed the Inspector," tell your police force not to obey illegal or unconstitutional orders. "

Senior police officers told other police officers to follow "scientific methods" of interrogation. The low-ranking police officers involved, including the station officer, were arrested. The deputy police superintendent was suspended.

Sounds familiar? Should. The more things change …

A year later, in August 2011, two younger brothers were lynched in the presence of police officers in Sialkot. A few months later, reports of a torture cell inside the headquarters of the Crime Investigation Agency in Lahore (the Kotwali Office) made the rounds.

In 2018, a boy was sexually assaulted inside a private torture cell near Lahore, while an official police video recorded the assault. Only in the first week of September of this year, we learn about the tragic deaths of Salahuddin Ahmed, Amjad Ali and Amir Masih.

Related: Police torture abounds. When will the state legislate against you?

Last year, lawyer Javeria Younes presented her investigation into torture in custody in Pakistan. She surveyed lawyers, social activists, members of law enforcement agencies and victims of torture in five major cities in Pakistan.

She discovered that, in addition to torture being used as an instrument to extract evidence, it is also "encouraged and encouraged by the state to maintain its order," explaining why police officers and the public complain about the lack of will. policy to reform police departments and improve civil police culture.

According to Madadgaar's helpline records, Younes discovered that between 2009 and 2013, there was a dramatic increase in incidents of torture of both men and women. In 2008, the Madadgaar helpline had published its own findings based on reported incidents of police torture throughout Pakistan between January and June. He found that in those six months, 743 cases of police torture had been reported, mainly from Punjab (406), Sindh being the second worst (304).

A comparison of the provincial capitals showed 177 cases of police torture reported in Lahore in this period, against 45 in Karachi. In the cases studied, "torture" included a variety of techniques ranging from murder to rape, illegal detention, physical torture and harassment.

Today, a handful of legal frameworks protect civilians from torture in police custody. The Penal Code of Pakistan prohibits causing "harm" by extracting confessions (but does not use the word "torture"). Article 14 (2) of the Constitution prohibits torture in custody and states: "No one shall be subjected to torture in order to extract evidence." Article 10 of the Constitution prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention. Article 176 of the Code of Criminal Procedure requires a masterful investigation in cases of deaths in custody, but as is common knowledge, such investigations are rarely conducted.

Despite these provisions, as Sarah Belal, executive director of the Pakistan Justice Project, has stressed, torture must be criminalized and prohibited. A bill that criminalizes torture was presented at the National Assembly in 2014, but has not yet been enacted. (The proposed Torture, Death of Custody and Violation of Custody (Prevention and Punishment) Act of 2015 was approved by the Senate in 2015).

Symbols of the law and "terror"?

By focusing on police torture, it is now customary to begin by recognizing your colonial roots. In 1855, the Madras Torture Commission produced a 400-page document that showed how tax authorities had been misusing their surveillance powers and brutally extracting income from the poor. But even after the Torture Commission had conducted an investigation and subsequent reform committees highlighted this issue, police abuse remained rampant.

In his study on torture under colonial rule in India, Anupama Rao analyzed how allegations of torture against the colonial regime and the police were set aside when responsibility was transferred to pre-colonial regimes and torture was seen as a legacy of "native" punishment practices. "

There is a similar tendency in Pakistan to distance police administrators and their political masters from allegations of police misconduct, transferring the blame to colonial laws and continuities and not to the current surveillance policy that feeds on institutional weaknesses. of our police organizations.

Read below: What Sahiwal's shooting about police culture tells us

Since we have been independent for more than seven decades, we must ask ourselves: do colonial policies, practices and laws perhaps adapt to our political actors, their civil and military establishments and serve their interests? What else explains this obvious lack of will towards institutional reform, inconsistencies in the application of existing laws and total disregard for procedural justice?

The prevalence of police use of excessive and lethal force continues to raise these and many other questions. In the 1990s, the then Interior Minister, general (retired) Naseerullah Babar, propagated and popularized the idea of ​​"fighting terror with terror." This statement reflected not only Babar's military background, but also highlighted the idea of ​​police terror that was present both before and after Pakistan's independence, and capitalized on it.

In 1973, an opinion in an English newspaper had criticized the "custodians of law and order, namely the police … [for] contributing to his participation in the spread of terror among the people. "In 1984, I. A. Rehman wrote:

"Our police only know one method of investigation. The investigation often means the removal of the confession under physical pressure. It is true, the law does not accept confessions obtained under duress. However, the practice continues because police officers know that once a confession is made, assured, it is justified with evidence discovered by the accused, the latter will be too concerned with the risk of conviction to complain about the violence inflicted on him. "

Thirty-five years and a generation of police later, informal and extra-legal procedures and practices remain unchanged, and the philosophy of fighting terror with terror has been institutionalized. In the operations of the 1990s in Karachi, both the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Sindh Police were known for using lethal techniques to extract information from people in their confinement.

It was through the reports of the torture cells of the Crime Investigation Agency, established for political victimization, that the practice of cheera He entered public awareness as a method used by selected police officers to cause unbearable pain to the detained suspect by spreading his legs and stretching them in opposite directions, suddenly or gradually.

For its part, the MQM had similarly established its torture centers to reflect police practices and inflict excessive violence on those accused of spying on behalf of the police and intelligence agencies, intensifying a vicious circle of torture and terror that was symbolized in the bori laash band.

This human rights crisis in Karachi, the product of torture, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of political opponents designated as & # 39; terrorists & # 39; It has continued in Operation Karachi in progress since 2013, legitimized through counterterrorism narratives and partially legalized through frameworks such as the Pakistan Protection Act, 2014 and the amendments to the 1997 Counter-Terrorism Act.

Over the years, news reports and investigations by journalists have provided detailed information on torture and murders in police custody and illegal detentions. In 2010, following the incident in Chiniot, a journalist cited a deputy superintendent of the Punjab Police claiming:

"Public punishments create fear of the police among the public, and believe me that 80 percent of the crime is controlled in this way … Low-ranking police officers who are & # 39; famous & # 39; for using Third grade media are very popular among senior officials and many of them are appointed investigative officers to control crimes and criminals. "

Also popular are police officers who can be sponsored by politicians for carrying out acts of violence for political reasons. Stories of torture detail not only the perpetration of violence by police officers, but have also exposed the link between crime, politics and the police.

In recent history, this has been evidenced in Karachi in the case of the Lyari gang war, where gang leaders, sponsored by political parties, were able to select which police officers would be sent to police stations within Lyari This selection could determine which police officers would be complicit in the torture and even the killing of rival gang members.

Dawn Investigations: Rao Anwar and the death camps of Karachi

The murder of Arshad Pappu is a good example. In 2013, acting at the behest of Uzair Baloch and the Amn People's Committee, three police inspectors kidnapped Pappu, Baloch's rival, and handed him over to the first. Pappu's brutal murder and beheading was videotaped and widely disseminated. Although the inspectors were arrested, the money stopped there when it should have passed to the scapegoats complicit in the police use of lethal force.

In 2015, a senior Sindh Police officer publicly distinguished between fry and fry, a formula used to symbolize methods of police use of excessive and lethal force. Half of the fry referred to the torture of suspects in police custody, while the fry referred to their extrajudicial executions. In a statement, the officer said:

"Extrajudicial executions and other actions cannot be officially justified, but society has come to accept this & # 39; modus operandi & # 39; of the police to eradicate crimes and make the streets safer … You can see that the police have restored peace and order in the city through this modus operandi. "

This statement echoes the multitude of statements made during this operation in Karachi, as well as those of the 1990s. What it also reflects is the belief of certain police officers (and perhaps many members of our society) that such modus operandi It is essential, legitimate and justified, if not legally, morally.

Such attitudes towards vigilantism by the police have been observed with greater firmness in the pedestalisation of police personalities such as Chaudhry Aslam and Rao Anwar and the dependence on police killings by civil and military regimes in Pakistan.

A selective review of the literature.

Pakistan-centered police investigation has a long way to go. However, a handful of studies provide important information about police violence. In 2008, for example, Chaudhry et al. examined more than 1,800 victims of alleged police torture who were patients in the office of the legal medical surgeon in Lahore.

In their study, they discovered that the majority of victims of police torture were men (91.5 percent) and those who belonged to lower socioeconomic groups, such as the working class in rural areas, were victims more frequently. In their description of the methods used against these victims, they write that torture techniques include physical traumas caused by blunt objects, rolling heavy objects on the victims' bodies, placing them on ice blocks, suspending them in the air ( by your limbs or upside down))

Physical torture was recorded through visible injuries ranging from skin abrasions to bone fractures. The most attacked body parts during torture techniques included buttocks, soles of the feet, chest, thighs, palms and wrists. The victims were predominantly tortured with sticks and "wide, flat leather slippers dipped in mustard oil to increase the impact of pain."

Read also: & # 39; Mr President, grant mercy to my daughter who was tortured in a false murder confession & # 39;

In 2012, Mirza et al. conducted a cross-sectional autopsy study over a period of six years (2005-2010) on deaths in custody in Karachi, examining 61 cases, of which 21 percent were homicidal deaths due to physical trauma as a result of torture. However, the study does not indicate whether such torture was inflicted by police and prison officials or fellow prisoners.

In 2017, academics from Heavy Industries Medical Industries Taxila, Wah and Rawalpindi published a study based on 318 autopsies performed at a hospital in Rawalpindi in 2015. They discovered that, of these, at least eight people (seven men, one woman) They died due to police torture in Rawalpindi, most likely during interrogation.

In 2012, Asad Jamal wrote about extrajudicial executions for the Pakistan Human Rights Commission. In his discussion of deaths in custody, Jamal discovered that between 1992 and 2009, the number of deaths in police custody had decreased, demonstrating that trends may change over time.

However, Jamal acknowledges that such statistics do not include the many incidents of police abuse that are not reported. In addition, the report underlines that this decrease was probably due to the increasing media coverage of such incidents, after which the identity of the victims and perpetrators is revealed, and not necessarily due to cultural changes within the police or any Significant policy change in general.

As the investigation by a Kamran Adil police officer shows, police violence continues to be legitimized when it is said to be "necessary" to extract evidence, control crime (through murder by encounter, for example) or in compliance with orders judicial. Such legitimization hardly legalizes all forms of police violence and is likely to allow the repetition of such practices (torture and extrajudicial executions), even if the presence of guard dogs periodically deter police and their sponsors.

Thoroughly: How not to improve law and order in Karachi

In 2014, the International Human Rights Clinic Allard K. Lowenstein of Justice Project Pakistan and Yale Law School published a detailed report on police torture in Faisalabad. The report was based on allegations of police abuse and misconduct in Faisalabad between 2006 and 2018, and was based on 1,867 medical certificates for medical evaluations, interviews with victims of police abuse and a review of existing laws. The researchers found that in 1,424 of the 1,867 cases of alleged police abuse (76pc), doctors had confirmed signs of physical abuse.

In 2016, Najm-ul-Sahr-Ata-Ullah and Saroop Ijaz wrote an extensive report for Human Rights Watch that documented torture in custody, extrajudicial executions and other forms of police abuse in Pakistan. In the introductory section, they quote a police officer: "My staff and I are expected to be on call 24 hours a day. We are perpetually exhausted … How can you expect people to work in these conditions and not crack? ? "

The report is one of the few that adequately recognizes the limitations and pressures of the police, exposing institutional failures and their exploitation by powerful social elites (politicians, landowners, civil and military bureaucracy). It is this exploitation by powerful elites that, I believe, should be thoroughly investigated in future research.

A call to institutional introspection

Recently, a senior police officer explained to me that the police have used torture primarily for the following purposes: (1) to extract confessions, (2) to recover stolen objects (such as the recent torture of a Vehari woman by the police)), (3) to earn extra money and (4) to appease a "teacher" or a political patron (such as the torture of MQM party workers).

In other discussions, police officers have pointed out that the use of torture and extrajudicial practices by select police officers give the rest of the institution a "bad name."

Countless recommendations have been provided by journalists, analysts and police on how to positively change police organizations in Pakistan. These range from investments in police recruitment, training and education, to independent oversight mechanisms that ensure accountability (internal and external) and transparency, to higher salaries for police officers and better resources for police stations and units. and the digitization of the police (including the installation of cameras). inside police confinements).

These are all solid recommendations and I have no doubt that police reform and freedom from police torture go hand in hand, as the police themselves have recognized.

Based on some of the previous readings and my own investigation on police surveillance, I want to offer some reasons why the police themselves should rethink the promotion of police abuse or ignore its prevalence.

Police abuse corrupts institutional memory:

Continued dependence on torture and similar methods teaches low-ranking police officers that acting outside and above the law, through informal procedures and practices, is routine and justified.

He tells them that the confessions extracted through torture and the elimination of criminals will amount to positive professional achievements and good performance that will guarantee them job security and accelerated promotions, not to mention the fattening that comes with the financial benefits that police officers often obtain. that appease their policies. patron

To explore: The & # 39; encounters & # 39; of Punjab with sectarianism

This thought prepares new recruits when they enter the organization and this is transmitted to others, generation after generation, which explains why every few years we see a protest over police abuse, ranging from torture to extrajudicial executions.

As Faisal Ali Raja, a senior police manager, has properly stated, "the change in behavior under a controlled environment in colleges and training schools is quite easy, but the real challenge begins when a new recruit begins to work in the field. ". The education the officer receives at work has a fundamental role to play in the way he will behave fairly or unfairly with civilians.

Promotes the politicization of the police.

As Zaigham Khan recently wrote, "without the police, elections cannot be won, property cannot be seized and retained, and adversaries cannot be tamed." Knowing that certain officers and police officers may be employed for extralegal purposes, other state institutions rely on the police to carry out their dirty work.

This means that civil police remain vulnerable to external political influences and demands and can be used as a tool for political assassinations and to repress dissent, opposition and other challenges to the status quo.

Opinion article: Roots of deaths in custody

Police routinely claim that they are under pressure to deliver This delivery of police action in the form of forced confessions and extrajudicial executions raises important questions about the policy behind the police. Who is authorizing such practices? Where do these pressures come from? Police officers know the sources better than anyone.

Those who resist politicization are vulnerable to transfers and suspensions. Those who do not, expose the rest of the range to these external pressures, becoming, actively or passively, facilitators of police politicization and subsequent abuse of power. Since all police activity is political, this is perhaps the most challenging aspect of this profession.

Police legitimacy is eroded:

Public confidence in police organizations in Pakistan has generally been low. Allegations of torture and murder further undermine the reputation of police officers and result in civilians harboring a negative image of the police, even if they have never interacted with police officers, due to the perception of thaana culture.

This means that civilians will be less likely to respect the authority of police officers or believe that the police are the most appropriate institution for maintaining order and public safety, encouraging them to look elsewhere (for example, private or paramilitary agents ). The lack of public legitimacy keeps the police demoralized and cynical police.

Evidence of an authoritarian subculture of the police:

Police culture generally has a bad reputation with embedded aspects such as cynicism, machismo, suspicion, discrimination, conservatism and authoritarianism highlighted routinely. Of course, this is extremely reductive, and it loses important and complicated nuances within organizational cultures, as well as its many positive attributes.

Undoubtedly, not all police officers are thoughtlessly authoritarian. However, practices and procedures can be authoritarian in nature, and they may very well be the product of authoritarian political values ​​in a country that projects itself as a democracy, which creates space for an authoritarian subculture within police departments. .

Authoritarian subcultures within organizations resist transparency, accountability and change; the focus is on exercising control and power; prioritize the maintenance of state order by force; and counteract the efforts of well-meaning officers who spend their careers dealing with the crisis in relations between the police and the community.

The more things change …

In 1974, prominent political scientist Eqbal Ahmad wrote an article. Pakistan – Signs to a police state, where he critically analyzed the events, policies and practices during the then regime of the Popular Party of Pakistan.

He warned that in Pakistan, repressive measures are increasing, as could be seen through an expanding national security sector, the militarization of the police, bureaucracy and civil society, the institutionalization of terror, repressions in the media, the creation of specialized police units (such as the Federal Security Force) and "the obvious indifference shown towards" unofficial "violence and terrorism against government opponents, and the emerging practice of systematic torture of prisoners."

Although police torture appeared marginally in Ahmad's article, it was contextualized as indicative of growing authoritarianism in Pakistan. I think his ideas are as relevant today as they were 45 years ago.

Are you working on police reforms? Write to us at prism@dawn.com