“Government is not a team. It’s a loose confederation of warring tribes.”
“In industry, if you screw things up you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, the Minister gets the boot.” @YesSirHumphrey
For those who don’t know (and I pity the ignorant), Sir Humphrey Appleby is a civil servant, a fictional character in the British television series, Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister. So far, there has been no finer (or funnier) work of art on the perils of government.
While Sir Humphrey’s wisdom is universal, in this space we shall talk about the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s push for police reforms. The party’s manifesto speaks with some vigour about reforming the police. Let’s consider if that vigour has been translated into some rigour.
Let me concede first that the prime minister, Imran Khan, is genuinely invested in reforming the police. So why has he failed so far? Because, as sagely noted by Sir Humphrey, the government is a loose confederation of warring tribes. Corollary: the prime minister, for all his powers, can be played by the bureaucrats. They can stall, filibuster, delay, deceive and kill any reform process.
That said, let’s get down to what’s happening.
Within a few months of the PTI government taking power, the Punjab government set up a Police Reforms Commission on the instructions of the prime minister. The much-celebrated former Inspector-General Police, Nasir Durrani, was chosen to head the Commission. Remember, he was the officer Khan used to cite constantly for his superb performance in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Durrani was told that he had carte blanche. He even got IGP Muhammad Tahir, a fine police officer, to head the Punjab police.
But that honeymoon didn’t last long. In fact, not more than a week after the Punjab government interfered with the work of IGP Tahir, a tussle began which ended with the government notifying the removal of Tahir. That same evening Durrani resigned from his position and the Commission, predictably, became defunct.
Then came a Committee under the Punjab law minister, Raja Basharat. Interestingly, yet another Committee, funded by the United Nations Development Programme was working on some other proposals for police reform. This committee was headed by former Director-General, Federal Investigations Agency and the first chairman of the National Counter-Terrorism Authority, Tariq Pervaiz. Its members included one MPA each from all political parties represented in the Punjab Assembly.
Now you know what working in silos means?
While all this was happening at the glacial pace at which governments work, there was another (fourth) Committee working on police reforms. Its Terms of Reference included Model Police Law, Police Accountability, Improving Quality of Investigation, Alternate Dispute Resolution, Urban Policing, Combating Terrorism within (sic!) Criminal Justice System and Legislative Reforms.
And pray, what Police Reforms Committee was/is this?
This PRC was constituted on May 15, 2018 by the Honourable Chief Justice of Pakistan in his capacity as Chairman Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan. The committee had the CJP as the chair, all serving IGsP and some former senior police officers as its members. This committee put forward its report titled, “Police Reforms: Way Forward,” on January 14, 2019.
Let us park this report for a while and go back to the political government’s attempts at reforming the police. The situation there was taken over by the Sir Humphreys in the Pakistan Administrative Services and they prepared a presentation for the prime minister. Their draft report was objected to by the Police Service of Pakistan officers and at a meeting some hot words were exchanged. Warring tribes, to recall Sir Humphrey’s quote!
The PM, according to the latest reports, has rejected the proposals presented to him by the PAS and has asked IGP-Punjab to present a new set of proposals to him within eight days, a process still underway.
Meanwhile, the Secretary, Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan has written a letter to all IGsP, dated Oct 3, 2019, asking them to implement the proposals contained in the report in light of the Supreme Court’s “judgement dated 21st January 2019 in Civil Appeals No. 148-150 of 2018” which has “laid to rest any ambiguity about the constitutional status of police laws.”
There’s a lot of detail I have skipped here because of paucity of space. But some salient points need to be made. Consider.
First, there have been any number of reports on police reforms since 1947. They are all gathering dust somewhere. A number of proposals have been made and practitioners know what the problems are. They are also, by and large, aware of the best practices to tackle those problems. The problem therefore is not a lack of knowledge or insight or suggestions. The reason we reinvent the wheel every few years is because organisational and other interests trump any serious implementation of reforms.
Here’s an example: Former General and President, Pervez Musharraf, embarked on a somewhat ambitious police reforms programme. He got three top police officers – former IGs Zulfiqar Qureshi, Afzal Shigri and Shoaib Suddle – to give him something new in the shape of the Police Order 2002. However, that reforms programme was necessarily linked with the overall Devolution Plan.
Both the devolution plan as well as the 2002 Police Order began to be diluted while Musharraf was still in power. Reason: the politicos who came to power in the 2002 elections did not want to deal with independent police officers any more than they wanted strong, autonomous, fiscally- and administratively-independent local governments. With Musharraf gone, the devolution plan, or whatever was left of it, was chucked out along with the police reforms.
While running KPK, the PTI government came up with a reformed Police Act which was a mixture of the 2002 Police Order and some new features. Punjab has been running a diluted version of 2002. The great province of Sindh, under the ‘progressive’ Pakistan Peoples Party, jumped back to the Police Act of 1861. And as for Balochistan, that is another story completely because police in that province has no powers in 95 per cent of the area.
Is reforming the police important? Of course. That’s a no-brainer. Will it be possible? No. At least, not unless we begin to think of policing in clear, unambiguous terms.
Here’s baseline clarity: there are several models of policing. The first, obvious, thing to do is to decide on what model we want to use. We are still grappling with that. Currently, policing is the purview of the provinces. But the top, officer cadre, the PSP, is a federal intake. The actual policing, which is also the real bayonet strength of police forces, is done by the provincial cadres. There is much mismatch in terms of education, skillsets and, in most cases, socioeconomic backgrounds.
The second issue is about appreciating the differences in urban and rural policing.
The third issue is accountability, a process much talked about. Bureaucrats try to make it more and more complicated by suggesting the creation of committees et cetera. This is of course a very important issue and would require a much lengthier discussion. But even that complex issue can be resolved without getting lost in intricacies.
Look at it this way. The reforms process is not just about changing organograms. It is about creating the proper policing skillsets. Take, for instance, the issue of police excesses and accountability. Consider that reforms will be debated and take time. Does that mean we can’t do anything in the interim? We can. How about having dedicated investigation rooms in police stations and install cameras there. The IO should record, clearly stating the time and place of investigation, his own name, the name of the suspect, the reason for the investigation. The IOs performance should be monitored by another officer. This record should always be available. Simple. If an excess has happened and there’s no record of it, that means these procedures were not followed. And if they weren’t followed, you know who to take to task.
Let me give another example: policing is not about brandishing rusty SMGs. It’s about specialised skillsets. Of the nearly 185,000 personnel of Punjab police, 125,000 are constables with little to zero policing skills. (These figures were given in a presentation some two years ago at the Central Police Office in Lahore.)
Lahore has a fabulous forensics laboratory. This was an important move by the previous PML-N government because it stressed the imperative of physical evidence for prosecuting criminals and terrorists. But its optimum utilisation requires that police investigators have policing skills, state-of-the-art tools for crime scene investigation and knowledge of what procedures to adopt when reaching a crime scene.
CSIs comprise a number of investigative specialists. They work as a team at the crime scene, identifying, collecting and processing evidence that is to be analysed by forensic specialists. It is this body of evidence that the prosecution then presents in a criminal court of law.
Have you seen the suits CSIs wear? They do it to ensure the crime scene is not contaminated. Has anyone seen our CSIs wear those suits? A senior police officer told me, half-jokingly, that the suits are there but nobody really cares. That is the problem. Nobody cares. And nobody cares because there are no SOPs, no procedural check-lists, no regard for procedures where they exist.
In a nutshell, while it is crucial to reform the police, it is equally imperative to train the personnel as police officers, and not just treat them as thugs in uniform. This is not by any way an exhaustive offering on police reforms. The idea is to highlight some anomalies and to also point to what can actually be done with rather simple procedures.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times and got interested in policing issues somewhat accidentally. He tweets @ejazhaider reluctantly.
“In industry, if you screw things up you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, the Minister gets the boot.” @YesSirHumphrey
For those who don’t know (and I pity the ignorant), Sir Humphrey Appleby is a civil servant, a fictional character in the British television series, Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister. So far, there has been no finer (or funnier) work of art on the perils of government.
While Sir Humphrey’s wisdom is universal, in this space we shall talk about the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s push for police reforms. The party’s manifesto speaks with some vigour about reforming the police. Let’s consider if that vigour has been translated into some rigour.
Let me concede first that the prime minister, Imran Khan, is genuinely invested in reforming the police. So why has he failed so far? Because, as sagely noted by Sir Humphrey, the government is a loose confederation of warring tribes. Corollary: the prime minister, for all his powers, can be played by the bureaucrats. They can stall, filibuster, delay, deceive and kill any reform process.
That said, let’s get down to what’s happening.
Within a few months of the PTI government taking power, the Punjab government set up a Police Reforms Commission on the instructions of the prime minister. The much-celebrated former Inspector-General Police, Nasir Durrani, was chosen to head the Commission. Remember, he was the officer Khan used to cite constantly for his superb performance in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Durrani was told that he had carte blanche. He even got IGP Muhammad Tahir, a fine police officer, to head the Punjab police.
But that honeymoon didn’t last long. In fact, not more than a week after the Punjab government interfered with the work of IGP Tahir, a tussle began which ended with the government notifying the removal of Tahir. That same evening Durrani resigned from his position and the Commission, predictably, became defunct.
The reforms process is not just about changing organograms. It is about creating the proper policing skillsets
Then came a Committee under the Punjab law minister, Raja Basharat. Interestingly, yet another Committee, funded by the United Nations Development Programme was working on some other proposals for police reform. This committee was headed by former Director-General, Federal Investigations Agency and the first chairman of the National Counter-Terrorism Authority, Tariq Pervaiz. Its members included one MPA each from all political parties represented in the Punjab Assembly.
Now you know what working in silos means?
While all this was happening at the glacial pace at which governments work, there was another (fourth) Committee working on police reforms. Its Terms of Reference included Model Police Law, Police Accountability, Improving Quality of Investigation, Alternate Dispute Resolution, Urban Policing, Combating Terrorism within (sic!) Criminal Justice System and Legislative Reforms.
And pray, what Police Reforms Committee was/is this?
This PRC was constituted on May 15, 2018 by the Honourable Chief Justice of Pakistan in his capacity as Chairman Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan. The committee had the CJP as the chair, all serving IGsP and some former senior police officers as its members. This committee put forward its report titled, “Police Reforms: Way Forward,” on January 14, 2019.
Let us park this report for a while and go back to the political government’s attempts at reforming the police. The situation there was taken over by the Sir Humphreys in the Pakistan Administrative Services and they prepared a presentation for the prime minister. Their draft report was objected to by the Police Service of Pakistan officers and at a meeting some hot words were exchanged. Warring tribes, to recall Sir Humphrey’s quote!
The PM, according to the latest reports, has rejected the proposals presented to him by the PAS and has asked IGP-Punjab to present a new set of proposals to him within eight days, a process still underway.
Meanwhile, the Secretary, Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan has written a letter to all IGsP, dated Oct 3, 2019, asking them to implement the proposals contained in the report in light of the Supreme Court’s “judgement dated 21st January 2019 in Civil Appeals No. 148-150 of 2018” which has “laid to rest any ambiguity about the constitutional status of police laws.”
There’s a lot of detail I have skipped here because of paucity of space. But some salient points need to be made. Consider.
First, there have been any number of reports on police reforms since 1947. They are all gathering dust somewhere. A number of proposals have been made and practitioners know what the problems are. They are also, by and large, aware of the best practices to tackle those problems. The problem therefore is not a lack of knowledge or insight or suggestions. The reason we reinvent the wheel every few years is because organisational and other interests trump any serious implementation of reforms.
Here’s an example: Former General and President, Pervez Musharraf, embarked on a somewhat ambitious police reforms programme. He got three top police officers – former IGs Zulfiqar Qureshi, Afzal Shigri and Shoaib Suddle – to give him something new in the shape of the Police Order 2002. However, that reforms programme was necessarily linked with the overall Devolution Plan.
Both the devolution plan as well as the 2002 Police Order began to be diluted while Musharraf was still in power. Reason: the politicos who came to power in the 2002 elections did not want to deal with independent police officers any more than they wanted strong, autonomous, fiscally- and administratively-independent local governments. With Musharraf gone, the devolution plan, or whatever was left of it, was chucked out along with the police reforms.
While running KPK, the PTI government came up with a reformed Police Act which was a mixture of the 2002 Police Order and some new features. Punjab has been running a diluted version of 2002. The great province of Sindh, under the ‘progressive’ Pakistan Peoples Party, jumped back to the Police Act of 1861. And as for Balochistan, that is another story completely because police in that province has no powers in 95 per cent of the area.
Is reforming the police important? Of course. That’s a no-brainer. Will it be possible? No. At least, not unless we begin to think of policing in clear, unambiguous terms.
Here’s baseline clarity: there are several models of policing. The first, obvious, thing to do is to decide on what model we want to use. We are still grappling with that. Currently, policing is the purview of the provinces. But the top, officer cadre, the PSP, is a federal intake. The actual policing, which is also the real bayonet strength of police forces, is done by the provincial cadres. There is much mismatch in terms of education, skillsets and, in most cases, socioeconomic backgrounds.
The second issue is about appreciating the differences in urban and rural policing.
The third issue is accountability, a process much talked about. Bureaucrats try to make it more and more complicated by suggesting the creation of committees et cetera. This is of course a very important issue and would require a much lengthier discussion. But even that complex issue can be resolved without getting lost in intricacies.
Look at it this way. The reforms process is not just about changing organograms. It is about creating the proper policing skillsets. Take, for instance, the issue of police excesses and accountability. Consider that reforms will be debated and take time. Does that mean we can’t do anything in the interim? We can. How about having dedicated investigation rooms in police stations and install cameras there. The IO should record, clearly stating the time and place of investigation, his own name, the name of the suspect, the reason for the investigation. The IOs performance should be monitored by another officer. This record should always be available. Simple. If an excess has happened and there’s no record of it, that means these procedures were not followed. And if they weren’t followed, you know who to take to task.
Let me give another example: policing is not about brandishing rusty SMGs. It’s about specialised skillsets. Of the nearly 185,000 personnel of Punjab police, 125,000 are constables with little to zero policing skills. (These figures were given in a presentation some two years ago at the Central Police Office in Lahore.)
Lahore has a fabulous forensics laboratory. This was an important move by the previous PML-N government because it stressed the imperative of physical evidence for prosecuting criminals and terrorists. But its optimum utilisation requires that police investigators have policing skills, state-of-the-art tools for crime scene investigation and knowledge of what procedures to adopt when reaching a crime scene.
CSIs comprise a number of investigative specialists. They work as a team at the crime scene, identifying, collecting and processing evidence that is to be analysed by forensic specialists. It is this body of evidence that the prosecution then presents in a criminal court of law.
Have you seen the suits CSIs wear? They do it to ensure the crime scene is not contaminated. Has anyone seen our CSIs wear those suits? A senior police officer told me, half-jokingly, that the suits are there but nobody really cares. That is the problem. Nobody cares. And nobody cares because there are no SOPs, no procedural check-lists, no regard for procedures where they exist.
In a nutshell, while it is crucial to reform the police, it is equally imperative to train the personnel as police officers, and not just treat them as thugs in uniform. This is not by any way an exhaustive offering on police reforms. The idea is to highlight some anomalies and to also point to what can actually be done with rather simple procedures.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times and got interested in policing issues somewhat accidentally. He tweets @ejazhaider reluctantly.