Justice on Wheels: Pakistani police lace up skates to fight terrorism

The 20-member unit carries out counter-terrorism surveillance and community policing on in-line skates. It also has an equal number of male and female officers. Both facts are rarities in this city of at least 15 million, where the roads are crumbling and nearly every institution is male-dominated. Police officials say the unit, which first appeared in public in Dec, is a success. Critics call it a gimmick. 

“It’s a new concept for the public,” Aiman, 25, said. “When we started skating we were excited, but also nervous about falling. But the fear goes away when you’re in the field.” To some degree, the unit is a response to a public relations crisis. Police departments in Pakistan are among the country’s “most widely feared, complained against and least trusted government institutions,” the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a 2016 report. Pakistan’s PM, Imran Khan, rose to power in 2018 in part by promising police reform. 

This month, nine police officers were suspended in the eastern city of Lahore after they jailed employees of a restaurant that had refused to give them free burgers. Many people saw that incident as a sign that police corruption was still rampant. Fear and mistrust of the police run high in Karachi, where several officers have been charged with killing civilians in staged shoot-outs. In one high-profile example, a police inquiry found two years ago that Karachi officers had killed an aspiring model and three others, then falsely claimed that the victims were militants. 

The commander in charge of the operation, Rao Anwar, is now on trial for murder. Maqsood Ahmed, a deputy inspector general with the regional Sindh Police, said the new in-line skating unit was designed in part to address criticism that Karachi police officers didn’t know how to interact with civilians. The sight of officers on skates, he added, has helped to “lighten the mood” in malls where they patrol. But the skating unit isn’t just out to make friends. Ahmed said its primary responsibility was counter-terrorism surveillance in public areas, including parks and cricket stadiums. 

He said the in-line commandos had already made arrests, improved the force’s response rate at crime scenes and protected several high-profile officials, including Khan and President Arif Alvi. Aiman, who joined the Sindh Police two years ago, said she had a deep commitment to the counter-terrorism wing that her in-line skating unit belongs to. Cities in Britain, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere have started skating police units over the years, with mixed results. Mudassir Ali, a Sindh Special Security Unit police commando who has trained officers for the skating unit, said that he modelled it on examples from abroad. 

Putting officers on skates to improve the police force’s relationship with the community could potentially make sense in Karachi, but not if they are armed, said Zoha Waseem, a research fellow at the Institute for Global City Policing at University College London. There is little evidence from other cities that in-line skating units help police forces fight crime, she added. Also, Karachi is full of potholes. “This is why it’s hard to see this initiative as something more than police propaganda,” she said. “We don’t know how sustainable it will be, and I wonder if this budget could have better been spent elsewhere.”