- Banning smartphones won’t change thana culture
Of all the admissions of defeat, of all the most forlorn acknowledgements that police brutality cannot be controlled, nothing can go beyond IGP Arif Nawaz Khan’s order to all SHOs not to allow personnel to bring smartphones on duty in police stations, nor to allow visitors to bring them in. The IGP heads a force which has been guilty of repeated incidents of brutality, including a number of custodial deaths, and one off-station torture cell has been exposed, in Gujjarpura, where a man died after having his back broken while in custody. A video recording is not evidence admissible in court. Thus preventing them being made is more to prevent anyone from being caught on such a video, and thus being made to look bad, than to stop such offences from being committed.
The Punjab police has recently been getting some very bad press, not because videos are being recorded, but because its personnel have refused to change. They refused to change under Mian Shahbaz Sharif, who first vowed to change the thana culture, and have refused to change under Usman Buzdar, despite the change of three IGPs and the resignation of Nasir Durrani as head of the Punjab Police Reforms Commission. It should be clear that there is a rash of custodial deaths, not police encounters. However, it is no excuse that an interrogation gets out of hand.
The sort of tolerance implied by the banning of smartphones cannot be allowed. The problem is that the thana culture is well entrenched, and made hoary by usage, all the way to the top. That must be made to change, otherwise the culture will not change, and suspects will keep on being killed in custody.