A new force: unconventional policing in Karachi

In Pakistan’s largest city, a non-state body has taken on a key role in policing the state. How have its leaders negotiated their way through Karachi’s political minefield and resisted temptations to abuse their influence? What are the wider implications of this kind of provision of public services?

A paper from the Institute of Development Studies examines how Karachi’s Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) collects, processes and analyses crime data. It explores how this business-led organisation has remained non-partisan – in a city notorious for violent ethnic, religious and political conflict – and managed to improve the work of a corrupt, inefficient and politicised police force.

The CPLC is an independent statutory institution with a mandate endorsed by federal and provincial leaders. It runs the entire computer crime database for the city of Karachi and is expanding it to the province of Sindh. Several law enforcement and paramilitary agencies rely upon CLPC resources and expertise in detection of serious crimes.

Services being performed by the CPLC have not been explicitly delegated or contracted out to it by the state. Originally intended to be a network of local Neighbourhood Watch Committees to provide citizen eyes and ears for the police, it has turned into a well-resourced body effectively setting its own agenda. Funding and equipment is received from the business community, individual well-wishers and multinationals: the state’s contribution has declined to 20 per cent.

Key reasons for the CPLC’s success include:

• creation of mechanisms to monitor crime investigations, identify problem areas, assist the police in actual detection, reduce police extortion and illegal detention and provide access to justice for the poor
• its ability to negotiate between a host of overlapping law enforcement agencies and bureaucracies
• development of recognised expertise in extortion and kidnapping cases, phone monitoring and vehicle crime
• good relations with the general public who pass to the CPLC information they would not otherwise give to the police
• the lack of political affiliation of CPLC members – reinforced by informal networks in the business community involved in selection and peer monitoring
• its unwillingness to exercise the full oversight functions assigned to it, in case this might compromise working relations with the police and affect a longstanding and mutually beneficial partnership.

The report stresses that the CPLC is neither a form of community policing nor a contractor, but should be understood as a co-production organisation – the product of an institutionalised, long-term relationship between state agencies and organised groups of citizens where both make substantial resource contributions.

Could this kind of partnership work in other contexts where conventional governance arrangements have broken down and ‘citizen security’ is merely an aspiration? Implications from the research suggest the need to realise that:

• It is legitimate to share state authority with non-state actors in crisis situations where state agencies lack the will or resources to carry out their functions.
• We must not get hung up on categorisation: rather than dismissing such ‘irregular’ governance mechanisms, the focus must be on improving them.
• Co-production can foster the emergence of an apolitical countervailing elite in circumstances where politics, policing and the civil service are hindered by conflict between entrenched interests.
• A defining feature of co-production arrangements is that conventional or legal boundaries between public and private are necessarily blurred.

 

Source(s):
‘Co-producing citizen security: the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee in Karachi’, Working Paper 172, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, by Mohammad O. Masud, 2002 Full document.

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 23 July 2003

Further Information:
Carol Spencer
Centre for the Study of the Future State
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678668
Fax: +44 (0)1273 621202
Contact the contributor: C.Spencer@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK

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