Official crime statistics tell you about the crimes that got registered. They tell you nothing about the ones that didn’t – and in Pakistan, according to the estimate cited by one criminologist studying crime data across several countries, that second category is roughly six times the size of the first. Only about fifteen percent of crimes that occur are ever reported to police in the first place; the rest sit in what criminologists call the dark figure of crime, the gap between what actually happens and what any statistic can ever capture. In Pakistan, that gap has a specific, well-documented mechanism behind it, and it starts the moment someone tries to walk into a police station and file a report.
What’s Supposed to Happen
Under Section 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, police have a clear legal duty: when they receive credible information about a cognizable offense, they must register it on the prescribed form. This is the First Information Report, the FIR – the document that formally opens an investigation. In practice, it’s usually a semi-literate head constable, working as the station’s clerk, who writes it up, and that single administrative act is where the investigation actually begins.
What Actually Happens
Getting a case registered at all is, by most accounts, one of the hardest parts of the entire process. The station clerk is often reluctant even to take down the complaint, and will typically try every angle to talk the complainant out of it – warning that filing a case brings not just trouble but public dishonor on top of it. If the complainant pushes through that resistance anyway, the next hurdle is procedural: deciding which law the case falls under – the Pakistan Penal Code, martial law regulations, or a separate Sharia enactment – each of which apparently carries its own informal “fee” before a dedicated clerk will actually write the report. Only after that payment does the case formally begin – or, more honestly, that’s where the ordeal really starts. Investigating officers often cite the need for a vehicle to reach the crime scene as a pretext for further payments, benefiting influential people and their favor-seekers along the way, with additional costs layered on top. By the time it’s over, the complainant or victim frequently ends up losing more to the process of reporting the crime than they lost to the crime itself. Faced with that calculation, honest, respectable people frequently just decide it isn’t worth it, and never go to the police station at all.
“Burking”
Declining to register a case that should legally be registered has its own name: concealment of crime, known in police English by the old term “burking.” There was a time, especially in Pakistan’s earlier years as a police service, when this actually carried consequences: if a senior officer discovered that a station house officer had concealed a crime, both the officer and the clerk responsible were immediately suspended pending a departmental inquiry, and dismissed outright if the allegation held up.
That system of accountability has largely broken down. Concealment today often happens with the knowledge, and sometimes the active participation, of senior officers themselves – because an artificially low crime count makes it look like police have crime fully under control. The short-term effect is exactly that: a flattering picture. The long-term effect runs the other way entirely. An offender who learns that nothing happened to him the first time is emboldened, not deterred, and goes on to commit further crimes with that lesson firmly in mind. Crime seeps into a society’s fabric this way, one unregistered case at a time.
A Society Where Lawlessness Runs Through Everything
Pakistani society carries a specific illness: lawlessness that has spread through nearly every institution – politics, business, industry, agriculture, education. Everyone in it seems to be looking for their own way around the law rather than through it, which makes police concealment less an isolated failure than one symptom of a much broader pattern. The same pattern shows up in religiously motivated violence with a body count that, by one newspaper’s estimate, has run to roughly 200 deaths a year; in the drug trade and smuggling; in forged identity documents; in violations of banking law by finance companies and their collapses; in counterfeit agricultural chemicals and medicines; in organized land-grabbing; in adulterated food sold at schools and hospitals; and, running through nearly all of it, in bribery reaching almost every level of government service.
Put a number on the concealment itself, and the picture sharpens further: of complaints that reach the police, roughly fifteen percent get formally registered, and the remaining 85 percent are quietly absorbed through exactly this kind of concealment. Applied against any official table of registered crime – the kind that shows totals climbing from 74,107 in 1947 to over 150,000 by 1981 – that ratio is the honest way to read the numbers: not as a count of everything that happened, but as roughly one-seventh of it.
Even that undercount comes with its own gaps. The 1947 figures almost certainly exclude the violence of Partition itself. The pre-1958 figures don’t capture the unrest of the movement against Ayub Khan’s government. And the crimes committed during the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government were never folded into the record either. Each of those was a period of significant, well-documented violence – and each is effectively invisible in the official statistics, for the simple reason that a statistic can only count what someone was willing, or able, to write down.
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