Pakistan has become increasingly good at counting the activity of its criminal-justice system. We count arrests, FIRs, raids, prosecutions, prison admissions, new laws and cameras installed on streets. What we rarely count with the same seriousness is whether people are actually safer, whether investigations are becoming better, whether victims trust the police, whether courts deliver justice within a reasonable time, or whether people released from prison are less likely to commit another offence.
This distinction matters because activity is not the same thing as success. A government can announce thousands of arrests without reducing victimisation. A police department can register more cases without becoming better at investigating them. A city can install an impressive network of cameras without making its streets meaningfully safer. We often mistake what the state does for what the citizen experiences.
Anyone who has spent a morning outside a sessions court in Sindh has probably seen her. She arrives before the courtroom opens, her chadar drawn over her head, a plastic bag of roti beside her. Her son was arrested months ago. She does not fully understand the charge. By afternoon, a clerk tells her that the hearing has been adjourned. She ties the bag shut and goes home.Next month, she will return.She appears in no crime statistic. Her son does — as an arrest. That small scene captures something that national crime figures often fail to show: criminal justice is ultimately experienced by people, not institutions. The mother does not care how many arrests the police department announced that month. She wants to know why her son is still waiting, whether the investigation is lawful, whether the evidence is reliable and when the case will actually be decided.
Pakistan’s criminal-justice debate therefore needs to move away from the language of institutional activity and towards the language of outcomes. The most important question should not be how many people were arrested but whether fewer people became victims. It should not be how many cameras were installed but whether crime actually declined in the places where they were installed. It should not be how many prisoners entered the system but whether the system eventually made society safer.
One reason this is difficult is that the official crime figure is never the whole crime figure. Police statistics tell us what was reported and registered. They cannot automatically tell us what victims decided not to report. Fear, stigma, distrust, financial costs, pressure from families or communities, or the belief that nothing will happen after an FIR can all keep crimes outside the official record. Criminology has long recognised this as the dark figure of crime.
This means that even a decline in reported crime needs interpretation. It may indicate that fewer crimes are taking place. It may also indicate that fewer victims are reporting them. Conversely, a rise in reported crime may sometimes reflect better reporting or improved police registration rather than an actual increase in victimization. Pakistan needs to confront this problem directly through regular national victimisation surveys. A scientifically designed survey, beginning with representative studies in Karachi and rural Sindh and eventually covering the country, could ask people whether they have experienced crime, whether they reported it, why they did or did not report it, how the police responded, how safe they feel and how much confidence they have in the justice system.
Such a survey would not replace police statistics. It would test them. Without that second lens, the official number can improve while the street does not.
The prison system offers an even more obvious example of the difference between activity and outcome. Pakistan’s latest prison data shows that the problem is not simply the number of people behind bars but the amount of time people spend inside while waiting for their cases to be decided. According to the 2026 Annual Prisons Data Report, the country’s prison population has reached 110,513, while 82,988 prisoners — roughly three out of every four — are under trial. The prison system is operating at more than 160 per cent of its authorised capacity.
The figures are difficult to read as merely a prison-management problem. They describe a justice system in which detention before conviction has become a massive part of the criminal process.
An under-trial prisoner is not automatically unlawfully detained. Pre-trial detention can be lawful when the conditions for it are satisfied and detention is necessary. The question is whether it is being used proportionately, whether cases are moving, whether detention is regularly reviewed and whether accused persons have meaningful access to legal representation.
When three-quarters of the prison population is awaiting trial, however, delay is no longer an occasional administrative inconvenience. It becomes part of the structure of criminal justice.
The consequences do not stop at the prison gate. A person waiting months or years for trial can lose employment, income, education and family stability. His ability to defend himself may also deteriorate as witnesses disappear, evidence becomes harder to locate and the economic burden of litigation grows.
This is why the question should not simply be how many people are in prison. We should ask who is detained, why they are detained, for how long, under what safeguards and what happens after they leave.
The same principle applies to policing. Crime is not one problem and therefore cannot have one generic solution. Mobile-phone snatching on a Karachi street is different from kidnapping for ransom in northern Sindh. Gender-based violence presents different barriers to reporting and investigation from cyber fraud. Organised crime cannot be understood in the same way as opportunistic street theft.
Before choosing an intervention, policymakers need to understand the mechanism producing the crime. Evidence from policing experiments also gives us reasons to be cautious about grand claims. A coordinated set of randomised field experiments in six countries, including Pakistan, tested community-policing approaches involving roughly 9 million people. The overall experiment found no reduction in crime and no improvement in citizen-police trust from the interventions studied.
That does not mean community engagement is useless. It means that a good idea is not automatically an effective intervention.
The distinction is important. Trust is not the same as crime reduction. Community meetings are not the same as better investigations. More complaints are not necessarily evidence that crime has increased; they may indicate that citizens have become more willing to report it.
The same caution emerges from Bogotá. Researchers randomly assigned 1,919 high-crime streets to different combinations of intensified police patrols and municipal services. The study found no substantively meaningful overall reduction in crime and found evidence that some property crime was displaced to nearby streets.
That finding carries an uncomfortable lesson for governments that like visible operations. When crime falls on one street, the obvious question is whether it has actually disappeared or simply moved around the corner.
A programme should therefore be judged by its mechanism and its outcome, not by how impressive it looks in a press conference.
This becomes even more important as Pakistan expands surveillance technology. Cameras, facial recognition, databases and other digital systems may assist investigations, but technology cannot replace lawful investigation. A camera can record an offence. It cannot persuade a frightened witness to testify. It cannot guarantee that evidence was collected lawfully. It cannot determine guilt.
The more intrusive the technology, the stronger the safeguards must be. Questions of legality, necessity, proportionality, data retention, access, oversight and remedies are not obstacles to public safety. They are part of public safety.
A neighbourhood is not a suspect. A database entry is not guilt. An algorithmic flag is not a conviction.
The rule of law is not something the state should demand from citizens while treating it as an inconvenience for itself. What Pakistan needs is therefore not another declaration that it is becoming “tough on crime”. It needs a criminal-justice system that learns to measure what actually matters.
Police performance should be judged increasingly by the quality of investigations rather than simply by arrest numbers. Evidence, forensic work, lawful procedure, prosecution readiness and reliable case outcomes tell us more than a long list of arrests. An arrest without sufficient evidence should not be treated as completed success.
Courts need to be measured by more than the number of cases disposed of. Speed matters, but so do fairness, legality and the quality of decisions. A case closed quickly is not necessarily a case dealt with well.
Prisons should not be evaluated only through occupancy and security. Rehabilitation, education, vocational preparation, treatment, post-release support and reoffending should become central measures of performance. The purpose of imprisonment cannot reasonably be to produce people who emerge more damaged, more disconnected from society and more likely to offend again. And the system must become comfortable with publishing failure.
If an intervention reduces crime, publish the evidence. If it improves trust but does not reduce crime, say so. If crime is displaced to neighbouring areas, measure it. If a programme fails, publish the failure.
That is how serious policy learns.Unfortunately, governments often prefer success stories to evidence. An operation can be photographed. A new law can be announced. A camera can be unveiled. Arrest figures can be placed in a press release. None of these things requires the uncomfortable admission that the underlying problem may still be there.
Every criminal-justice statistic, however, represents a human life.
Behind an FIR may be a shopkeeper who lost his savings. Behind a kidnapping figure may be a family negotiating for the return of a child. Behind a prison number may be a father who has not seen his children for months. Behind an unreported crime may be someone who decided that approaching the state would cost more than remaining silent.
That is the crime we do not count. Tomorrow morning, somewhere in Sindh, that mother will probably sit outside a courtroom again, her plastic bag of roti beside her. The state may record another hearing, another adjournment, another case number and perhaps another statistic.But her experience will remain largely invisible.
A serious criminal-justice system should be capable of answering questions more important than how many arrests it made. Was the investigation lawful? Was reliable evidence collected? Was the accused given meaningful access to counsel? Was the case decided within a reasonable time? If convicted, was the sentence proportionate? If imprisoned, did the system work towards rehabilitation? If released, was the likelihood of reoffending reduced?
And above all: did the neighbourhood become safer?
Arrests are what the state does.Safety is what the citizen experiences. Justice is what the law requires.If Pakistan cannot measure all three, it may become increasingly efficient at counting the activity of the state while remaining dangerously poor at counting the suffering of its people.
