Trigger-happy police

‘Shocking, ‘act of terror’, ‘brutal’ – no words can quite describe the death-by-police-shooting of a 22-year-old young man in Islamabad in the early hours of Saturday. As per most accounts, Usama Satti is said to have been on his way back home after having dropped a friend (or cousin) off when he was stopped by the anti-personnel of Islamabad Police. When he allegedly did not stop his car, he was chased by the police who proceeded to then shoot at his car a number of times, seven of which bullets hit him in different parts of his body. After what seemed like an attempt at covering up the incident, or giving it a bit of a gloss, the preliminary investigation by the police does suggest that the police personnel were indeed literally trigger happy. The Islamabad chief commissioner has ordered a judicial inquiry to ascertain the real facts of the incident.

The tragic incident has been condemned across the board, from Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari to Maryam Nawaz Sharif to rights activists and ordinary citizens. However, condemnations hardly bring the dead back – something Pakistan well knows. Every few months, we are reminded – only to conveniently forget it after some outrage, a few pressers, an investigation or two – of the complete impunity with which the state behaves towards the citizens of this country. So much so that the euphemism ‘encounter’ has become an unfortunate part of our vocabulary to describe extrajudicial killings by the police. In a country where the justice system is weak and unreliable and the police have not proven up to the task of properly investigating criminal cases, law-enforcement personnel have taken the law into their own hands on far too many occasions. ‘Encounters’ became a common method of dealing with political violence in Lahore and Karachi in the 1990s and are now justified by describing the victims as terrorists. We had thought that it would be difficult for law-enforcement authorities to get away with this after the brutal Sahiwal case in 2019, when officers of the CTD had shot dead four people, including a father, mother and their teenaged daughter, in what the authorities described an intelligence-based operation and a shootout with ‘terrorists’. Obviously, it didn’t take long for the official version to be disputed, and a promise of an investigation made.

But there are scores of other incidents that do not end up being investigated because the victims are less sympathetic. We need to keep in mind that the only time it is appropriate for law enforcement to use lethal force is when suspects prove an imminent danger, which is why there needs to be more clarity about when law-enforcement officials are allowed to use lethal force. It seems as if the unofficial policy is that it is acceptable to kill first and ask questions later. As we saw in the protracted saga of Rao Anwar, even when multiple investigations have shown that a person was killed without any justification justice can be hard to come by. The same cannot be allowed to happen again if the rule of law is to hold any meaning. The PTI and PM Imran Khan had promised police reforms before coming into power, as well as after the Sahiwal case, but that promise too seems to have disappeared into thin air. All we can say is that when the ‘party of justice’ is in power, the least it can ensure is that its police force resist the urge to shower bullets into young men.