The Dream of a Crime-Free Society

Interesting article. It is apparant that this situation is prevalent when people think that they can get away with crime. You need to have a city Govenor with a `Zero Tolerance` attitude. This has apparently worked well in New York city, which used to be one of the violent city in the past, and is now considered fairly safe.

[including the fact that two of them spoke Punjabi whereas the other three spoke Karachi Urdu--something that suggested that they were policemen.]

...sherlock!... next time i see a group of five people in karachi, speaking in punjabi and urdu, i should know that pigs are around...right?

just curious cementdaur sahib but are you in any way friends or socially acquainted with safwan shah?

There are two point I would like to make here:

Commiting crime is too easy and gets easier in the Cosmopolitan city like Karachi

My family owns a few retail businesses on Tariq Road in Karachi and shops regularly suffer from these Dacoits, taking away cash on the premises, Remember Pakistan is still a cash based economy which means 99% of all transactions are Cash based which are not Banked until the next working day. Two years ago when I was Home for eid, we were held at gunpoint and I was present on the premises at the time. However, our very very brave Driver overpowered the main leader of the gang of four and the rest of our staff, myself included jumped on the rest and we brought them down without any rounds being shot. It was a stupid act coming to think of it as one of them was carrying any automatic Mouser. Anyways once overpowered and given the Purely Pakistani treatment that is meted out to theives, we asked them a series of questions and got some answers.

They belonged to Southern Punjab and came down here annually in Ramadan time to hit the busy and lucrative Retail areas. The police were involved and they had to pay an amount per successful event.(You have to remember that this is being extracted in lieu with the Pakistani ``Treatment``)They normally leave round Eid time and the amount they save lasts them the entire year.

So basically, These people belong to the rural areas and prey in the urban centres for their annual take. The police force and the huge Rural representation in the force, facilitates this and where they are not directly involved with the robbery, they are indirectly involved in the direction, timing and information, and also ensure the disappearance of these people. There have been stories whereby police has shot robbers in cold blood rather than arrest them as that might have lead to their complicity being aired by the captives.

There is always without fail an insider involved somwhere in the process.

The other type of robbers are the urban lower class youths from the different slums of Karachi. We were robbed last year at our house whilst(yet again) i was present and me and my entire family were held at gunpoint and the jewellry, cash and expensive items like cameras, watches, mobile phones and MY WORK laptop was taken away by these maniacs. They got entry by taking our dads name which meant an insider job, they knew all of us by names. This is resonated by the author in the article as well. A freind who exchanged some US Dollars was stopped on his way home and asked for the EXACT amount that he had exchanged.

A country that does not provide basic security to its citizens have failed in its most basic test. Law & Order , never being as important as for example the Army, has caused the deterioration it manifests today. Unless drastic measures are taken and in a society where the middle class is forever shriking, this problem is bound to increase.

Its actually Defence