Back in the days of the Raj, about 17-19 percent of the budget was spent on policing. That number slipped to average about 11 percent in the 70s and 80s. Now, in FY15, provincial spending on police will average about 7 percent of the combined budgets of the four provinces of Pakistan, despite an ever increasing need for effective policing across the country.
Provincial budget documents show that Punjab will be spending the most (Rs82 billion) on police in FY15, followed by Sindh (Rs55 billion), Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (Rs29 billion) and Balochistan (Rs10 billion); though on per capita basis, Punjab is budgeted to spend the least, whereas Sindh is expected to spend the most.
BR Research spoke to a host of current and former policemen, including those managing finances of police, but no one could explain these differences. However, intuitively speaking, the differences in per capita provincial spending on police could perhaps be explained by degrees to which each province is hit by deaths of civilian and security force personnel due to terrorism and other law and order issues (See graph).
Be that as it may, it is ironic that despite the sharp rise in terrorist attacks across the country, there hasn’t been any significant investment in specialised anti-terrorism expertise. While Punjab’s annual budget statement reflects an allocation of about Rs3 billion for counter-terrorism, there is no such allocation by other three provinces. Sources in Sindh Police informed BR Research also affirm that there has been some allocation for new equipment (about Rs3.5 billion) but there are no training budgets to combat terrorism head on.
This smacks the globally accepted wisdom. Christine Fair of Georgetown University noted in a dated article that “a police-led effort would be better than one led by the army, as the history of successful insurgency movements in disparate theatres across the globe shows”. A similar conclusion was made by a 2008 RAND Corporation study titled—How Terrorist Groups End-–that said effective police and intelligence work deliver better counter-terrorism results than the use of military force.
This is not to belittle the importance of the ongoing army operation in North Waziristan in FATA, but just to point that it is effective policing that will bring long-term sustainable results. Yet almost a decade after dealing with terrorism, there has been little to zero progress on police reforms to this date.
Currently, the average ratio of policeman per person in each province is at around 415, which is not far off from the UN standard for peacetime policing that recommends one police officer for every 400 persons. However, these numbers can be misleading if looked in isolation of the inefficiencies and the politicisation of the police.
So for instance, Punjab has the worst ratio, about one police officer per 578 people, whereas Sindh has a stronger force of one officer per 419 people. Yet Punjab police is regarded well than Sindh police in terms of public service delivery. (The recent incident of police brutality on charged political activists in Lahore is an exception.) This is because the policemen in Punjab have been provided better facilities than their counterparts in Sindh or elsewhere.
To this end, the National Highway and Motorway Police (NHMP), established in 1997, is a good example. Sources in police say that the motorway police was initially staffed with regular policemen who didn’t have any exceptional performance to boast for.
However, in just over a decade’s time, this force has garnered and maintained the reputation of an efficient law-enforcement organisation. NHMP has become a “corruption-free institution as a result of higher salaries, good training facilities, recruitment on merit, and the availability of modern equipment,” notes a 2011 study by the United States Institute of Peace titled Reforming Pakistan‘s Police and Law Enforcement Infrastructure.
NHMP keeps order on the fast lane, arguably an easier gig than policing the streets and putting outlaws behind bar. But it seems that Pakistan’s security czars can learn a thing or two from the NHMP story in order to make reformative investments in policing. The biggest of these lessons would be zero tolerance for crime, regardless of whosoever commits it.