Most police officers today are only semi-literate, don’t know the law in full, and often don’t know where to even begin an investigation. That gap shows up most starkly in the cases that ought to be the easiest to solve.
Murder cases, in principle, can be traced fairly easily – the crime leaves a body, a scene, and usually a motive close to the surface. Actual performance tells a much bleaker story. According to one newspaper report, Lahore averages roughly one murder case a week that goes permanently “untraceable” – abandoned for lack of leads. In one particularly disturbing case, in the Islampura police station area, an entire family of thirteen people – including women and children – was murdered, a mass killing rare enough that the Chief Minister personally ordered the arrest of suspects within 24 hours. Instead, the complainant waited months for any real movement, and got none. He eventually died still waiting. The case remains formally untraced to this day.
How Investigation Used to Work
Set against that record, a handful of cases from before independence stand out – not because the crimes were unusual, but because of how methodically they were solved.
Mirza Ashfaq Baig, who rose to Deputy Superintendent of Police in Lahore, recounted a case from early in his career, when he was still a Sub-Inspector there. An unclaimed trunk arrived at Lahore Railway Station on an incoming train. It sat in the station’s lost-and-found storage for a day or two before staff noticed a foul smell coming from it. When they opened it, they found a bundle inside – with a human leg protruding from it. A case was registered on the spot.
A matching leg turned up separately at Delhi’s railway station and was registered there as its own case. The rest of the torso surfaced in Lahore’s Anarkali area and was registered as yet a third case. Investigators eventually connected all three, and a proper post-mortem was carried out. The remains belonged to a woman, killed with a sharp weapon and deliberately dismembered, her body parts packed separately and dispatched to different railway stations to delay identification – sent, it turned out, from Lahore’s own cargo station.
Investigators worked outward from a simple physical clue: the sacking the remains had been wrapped in. From the weave and stitching of the cloth, they judged it likely came from Lahore’s grain market, and sent plainclothes officers, dressed as ordinary grain-market laborers, to gather information there. Slowly, they identified the particular knot style used to close the sack as distinctive, and traced it back to a specific rope-maker. That thread led them to a man who had gone missing around the same time as his wife, having claimed he’d travelled to Shimla with her, only to return alone. A search of his home turned up evidence confirming his wife was in fact missing. Confronted with the physical evidence assembled against him, he confessed. Officers made no use of torture, coercion, threats, or punishment to get there – only honesty and sustained legwork.
A second case, remembered from Bengal, is well known in police circles under a specific case name. A wealthy landowner in a district near Bardwan had two heirs to his considerable estate – two brothers. The older brother, a notorious miser, quarrelled constantly with the younger one over money. One day the older brother left for Howrah railway station and simply vanished. There was something faintly suspicious about the disappearance from the start, but no evidence of foul play surfaced to justify treating it as anything but that – a missing person, nothing more.
Once the younger brother inherited everything, he fell ill with what appeared to be plague and died within days. It occurred to his young widow that this looked less like an accident of fate than a single, orchestrated crime, unfolding in two acts. It was an unusual, striking suspicion – so she took it to the police and filed a case.
During the investigation, officers learned that the deceased younger brother had once been friendly with a doctor from the Pasteur Institute’s outreach clinic, where the doctor had trained. During his time there, a wax model used to demonstrate live symptoms of plague had gone missing, despite a considerable effort to locate it. Police suspected the doctor of taking it. Under questioning, the doctor confessed: he had taken the wax model, together with the younger brother, to Howrah railway station and used it – during the peak crowds of train arrivals and departures – to stage the older brother’s “disappearance,” clearing the way for the younger brother to inherit and, later, to fake his own death by disease using the same prop. The full investigation of this case became a staple of the curriculum at the Sardah Police Training College, kept as a case study on file for the officers who trained there.
A third example, from Lahore: Abdul Aziz Khan, then a DIG of police, had a suspect’s house searched after gathering a few threads of information. Officers found a bundle of ants converging on a specific spot and followed them to their conclusion – they had gathered around fragments of human flesh. Ants, it turned out, had marked the exact location for investigators. Following the trail of ants to their source revealed where the floor had been dug up, and the buried corpse was recovered from underneath. The suspect was arrested on the spot, and what had looked like a genuine mystery was solved.
A separate case involved a DIG passing near a hostel by Dyal Singh College. He noticed yellow-tinted water draining from a pipe out of one hostel room, day after day. On the third day, he brought a bottle, collected a sample, and had it sent to the department’s laboratory. The analysis found the water contained explosive residue. Police raided the hostel and arrested the young men living there, who turned out to be assembling a bomb.
Clever Criminals, Careless Investigators
Offenders are, on the whole, genuinely intelligent, and after committing a crime they generally try hard not to leave anything behind that could get them caught. Catching them takes people at least as sharp as they are. Our misfortune is that our police doesn’t have nearly enough people like that. Political recommendations bring in recruits chosen for loyalty to a patron, not for intelligence or the enthusiasm needed to make a name for themselves and their department through their own work. Today, the kind of investigation Punjab police is conducting is exactly why these older stories are worth telling here – a Lahore High Court judgment, in fact, cited these very cases as an example of a Rawalpindi division officer’s conduct.
The record of police performance drawn from these examples can be summarized fairly simply: our investigating staff’s work runs along the following lines. Our police doesn’t carry out a proper visual examination of a murder victim’s body – that’s a basic requirement of any real investigation. What our police does do is send the body off for a post-mortem, and the post-mortem report is expected to note every kind of mark of violence found on the body, to build the case file’s essential record. That report gets forwarded upward. Senior officers don’t verify it either – they don’t look, and they don’t check whether the body was properly examined for marks of violence before it was sent off, or whether the investigating officer made any attempt at all to trace what those marks might mean.
A doctor is assigned based on need, wherever one happens to be available, and prepares the report accordingly – but police rarely look at that report from their own investigative angle: was the victim killed by one person or several, was there any prior violence before the fatal act, was there some earlier struggle. If the weapon was bladed, an estimate of the wound could establish whether it came from in front, from behind, or from the side. If a firearm was used, an estimate could be made of the range the shot was fired from and even the relevant details of the weapon itself. None of it can be established if there’s no gunpowder residue found on the victim’s clothing, which would indicate how close the shooter stood when they fired. None of this concerns our investigating police whatsoever. Once the body is sent to the mortuary, their job is considered finished.
The next stage after the body is a careful study of the crime scene – a step our police simply skips. Police draw only a bare sketch of the scene and consider their work there done. They don’t search for the unusual, out-of-place objects that a suspect’s fingerprints or footprints might be found on. The very first principle of investigation is that every offender leaves some trace behind at every crime scene, and finding those traces is the investigator’s job.
Our police’s own established forensic laboratories – fingerprint bureau and toxicology bureau – are neither known to, nor ever called on for help by, the very officers meant to use them.
Investigating officers, and specifically retired investigative staff brought back on contract, keep the old subordinate officers filling their days with verbal instructions rather than doing the reading and writing the job actually requires. They neither go to crime scenes themselves nor make any attempt to trace evidence on their own; they merely take statements from witnesses. Senior gazetted officers are supposed to personally supervise the investigation of murder, armed robbery, dacoity, and licensed-weapons cases, and to compile and forward their own reports upward – but that rule, too, has by now been set aside. In truth, the work that a station house officer is supposed to do is exactly what our SPs and DSPs are doing today instead.
The scientific method of investigation was introduced by the British long ago, but it has now been essentially abandoned. Our investigating officers know nothing about which methods the best criminal specialists use to gather evidence. They don’t know how to lift fingerprints, and even where they do, they don’t know that lifting such evidence could help identify a suspect and, with the community’s help, actually bring the offender to justice. Investigation demands intelligence and hard work – and where subordinate staff are lacking in either, the whole effort goes down the wrong road. There is genuinely no time being spent preparing cases and evidence for court.
“This System Will Collapse”
People today have no confidence in law enforcement. Poor policing, corruption, coercion, violence, and unprofessional, unskilled officers have left the public deeply suspicious of the police, and public trust in the institution has essentially collapsed. This department has lost its own standing – and once a public institution loses the people’s trust, the government loses its own credibility along with it, and the whole system becomes hollow. Pakistan today faces exactly that situation.
The government has formed eleven committees and commissions to reform the police, alongside four internationally recognized commissions convened for the same purpose. Not one of their recommendations, or any practical reform proposal, has actually been implemented. Why? The clear answer is that whichever government holds power treats the police as a tool serving its own purposes – filing false cases against political opponents, harassing them through illegitimate means, and buying the loyalty of officers with favors and transfers in exchange.
Norman Inkester, then Secretary General of Interpol, wrote after a visit to review the state of policing: “The current police system is being destroyed by the governments that keep succeeding one another – ruined by political overreach that keeps misusing it. This department still hasn’t been fully described in these terms, because it still has, even now, loyal officers and other staff who are duty-conscious, professionally skilled, and capable of taking honest action – and they are simply being pushed out. It feels as though, if the institutions responsible for enforcing the law aren’t urgently given a solid, stable foundation, this system – and the best efforts of these officers and personnel – will collapse very quickly, not only in Karachi but in other parts of the country too.”
That warning was written on April 19, 1995. Today, the words are proving true in full.
May the Almighty have mercy on the people of Pakistan.
Crime and criminals are, without question, a subject worthy of serious scholarly and theoretical study – and so is the capacity and performance of the other institutions responsible for enforcing the law and policing society, a related but genuinely separate matter in its own right. But the honest truth is this: until that theoretical discussion is actually weighed against these institutional realities, no fair judgment can be reached about what really produces crime and creates criminals. Scholarly and theoretical debate can go on indefinitely, but making it mean anything requires gathering real evidence from the world immediately around us. The documented performance of Pakistan’s police is exactly that kind of evidence – close at hand, thoroughly recorded, and impossible to set aside.
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