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When a person walks into a police station to register an FIR, the first calculation they make is not whether the officer behind the desk can help them, but what it will take to be helped: a phone call, an introduction or the quiet understanding that something must change hands. The law assumes every citizen enters it on equal footing, but experience teaches otherwise.
There is the official procedure, defined in law and there is the one that operates in practice, shaped by who you know and what you can offer. The distance between entitlement and access is where public trust breaks down, and also where the system reveals how it functions.
Mistrust runs so deep that it shapes how Pakistanis imagine their own institutions. In dramas and popular fiction, the thanedar demanding chai paani, the SHO whose loyalty runs to a local politician rather than the public and the honest officer eventually transferred or killed are defaults, not exceptions. A child raised on these stories learns those unwritten rules long before ever entering a station. Fiction, here, documents not a distortion of reality but the way citizens have learned to read it.
The instinct is to explain all this through individual failure, framing corruption as a problem of bad officers, weak morality or inadequate training. That explanation is convenient, but it avoids a harder question: why the same outcomes persist regardless of who enters the system. The answer lies not in the moral character of individuals but in the structures that shape their choices.
Pakistan did not inherit a policing system designed for public service; it inherited one designed for control. Its framework was set by the British in the Police Act of 1861, passed after 1857 to produce a force loyal to the state rather than the public – a logic that has outlived the empire.
The Police Order of 2002 promised depoliticised postings and independent oversight, but successive governments rewrote those provisions within years, restoring executive control and neutering the public safety commissions meant to monitor it. The global ‘war on terror’ widened that discretion further under the banner of counterterrorism and pushed reform off the agenda. Reforms have adjusted the surface; the logic underneath has not.
Within that structure, corruption is not an aberration but is embedded in how discretion operates. When access to a complaint, an investigation step, or basic protection depends on an officer’s decision, that decision acquires value and over time, that value becomes transactional.
The people who enter the system are not unqualified; many pass competitive exams and receive formal training. The issue is the environment they enter, where training builds capability but incentives determine behaviour. When postings are political and accountability lacks independence, the system makes clear what it rewards and people adjust accordingly.
Public perception reflects this with consistency. Citizens do not engage the system with confidence; they navigate it with caution, anticipating informal payments and weighing complaints against the likelihood of outcome. Distrust, in that sense, is less a reaction than a rational adjustment to experience.
The burden of this arrangement does not fall evenly. For a woman reporting harassment, for a minority citizen seeking protection, for a daily-wage worker who cannot afford the informal toll, the cost of entering is often higher than staying out. Over time, entire categories of citizens learn to avoid the law rather than invoke it, and structural failure hardens into everyday exclusion.
The problem returns to design. Discretion remains wide where citizens engage the system, political influence shapes postings and transfers and oversight, where it exists, sits within the hierarchies it is meant to monitor. Misconduct, under these conditions, is not exceptional; it is quietly absorbed into the institution’s operations.
An Islamic governance lens does not change this diagnosis, but it sharpens the standard. Authority, in this tradition, is Amanah – a trust bound to justice. It demands impartial decisions, even at personal cost, and rejects the use of influence or wealth to distort them. Within that framework, the benefits of office are not privileges but breaches of trust. Set against that standard, the issue is not the absence of a moral framework but of arrangements that enforce it.
Three changes would begin to shift this. Narrowing discretion at the point of public contact – through digital FIR registration, mandatory time limits on investigative steps, and transparent case tracking – would strip transactional value from routine decisions. Depoliticising postings through an independent board with fixed tenures would break career dependence on political alignment. And placing civilian oversight outside the hierarchies it monitors, with inspection and complaint data made public, would give accountability a home. None of these ideas is new and awareness has never been the problem; real reform would constrain authority, and that is difficult in a system designed to avoid it.
For citizens, the consequences are immediate, as access to the law becomes conditional. For the state, the effect accumulates slowly but with greater consequence: legitimacy erodes not through a single failure but through repetition.
A system built for control cannot deliver service, and what appears to be a problem of training or morality is, at root, a problem of design. Amanah is not rhetoric; it is the measure by which authority becomes either a trust or a transaction. Until the structure changes, the police station will remain what most Pakistanis know it to be: a place where the law is not enforced but negotiated.
The writer is a non-resident fellow at the Consortium for Asia Pacific & Eurasian Studies. He tweets/posts @umarwrites
