Editorial
The Chakwal incident involving the Crime Control Department is not a story of administrative error or individual misconduct. To reduce it to a departmental inquiry against a few officers is to deliberately look away from the deeper crisis. The real question is not whether the officers violated procedure. The real question is why extrajudicial killing has become a pattern in Pakistan and why the state tolerates it.
Every constitutional democracy protects its citizens through law. When a person commits a crime, the state arrests, investigates, prosecutes, and allows a court to decide. This is due process. Its purpose is not only to punish the guilty but to shield the innocent from the unchecked power of the state. Remove this process and you remove the only wall standing between the citizen and arbitrary force.
Pakistan’s law enforcement institutions have lost public trust for reasons that are structural, not incidental. Weak investigation, dysfunctional prosecution, and a judiciary drowning in delay have together created space where extrajudicial action feels, to some, like a practical solution. It is not. When the bullet replaces the verdict, no one can say with confidence who was guilty and who was not.
Chakwal is a symptom of a larger institutional failure. Advanced nations do not control crime through police encounters. They build forensic capacity, strengthen prosecution, guarantee judicial independence, and hold every arm of the state accountable to the law. Force without accountability is not governance. It is coercion wearing a uniform.
Pakistan’s real problem is institutional weakness, not the absence of violence. More force applied through broken institutions only deepens the rot. What is needed is comprehensive reform of police, prosecution, and judiciary aligned with modern constitutional standards.
A civilised nation delivers justice through law, not through the barrel of a gun.
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