MORE than a year after the Supreme Court issued its order regarding law and order in Karachi, progress, as the SC discovered this week, has turned out to be as negligible as most Karachi residents predicted it would be. True, the nature of some of the city’s violence may have changed; it hasn’t seen the same intensity of violence it saw last summer, with hundreds of people dying in a handful of weeks in politically motivated killings. But each day brings news of four or five or eight people shot dead in targeted attacks for belonging to one political party or another, a sectarian group, or simply for being Shia or Ahmadi or of a particular ethnicity. The explosive spikes in death counts have been replaced by a slower but still unrelenting pace of killings that Karachiites have become desensitised to and that the rest of the country barely notices. As the Sindh attorney general admitted himself, more than 1,800 people have been killed in the city this year already. Add to that street crime: from cellphone snatching and mugging to kidnapping and extortion, Karachi’s residents live under the constant threat of having their property snatched and their lives endangered.

Nor can this be excused as being typical of the world’s largest metropolises. To some extent a city this large, with so many places to seek cover and so many people and weapons moving in and out of it, will never entirely be controlled by law enforcement. But Karachi also suffers from its own unique mix of politics and crime, with the competition for resources backed, or at least overlooked, by those who have political clout — people who, if they wanted to, could disallow crime in their fiefdoms within the city or permit law enforcement to function freely. Second, law enforcement here suffers from a dire lack of resources relative to the scale of the problem; with over half the city’s police assigned to VIP duty, administrative work or specialised units, about 11,000 policemen remain for maintaining law and order, a ratio of over 1,600 people per policeman that compares appallingly to other large cities around the world.

Ultimately that is why the SC’s instructions issued last year have not been followed: they do not address the roots of the problem. Solutions like deweaponising the city, depoliticising the police force, eliminating ‘no-go’ areas and rezoning police stations may well reduce violence if carried out. But they simply cannot be implemented without more resources and, crucially, without the requisite political will of the various groups that hold the levers of power in this city.