WE all know what is wrong with Karachi: every other day death descends on its streets to take innocent victims and then goes back to its lair only to return in a never-ending cycle.

The real dilemma is how to disrupt this routine of sorrow and protect helpless citizens who can hide but not run. Here are a few elements of what can be termed as the way forward in Karachi.

A start has to be made at the local police stations, the first line of defence against rampaging killers. At the moment, they are dysfunctional. They are either beholden to neighbourhood gangs or, in many cases, act as a refuge for hardened criminals.

Nepotism and jobbery have caused unqualified staff to be inducted in the police, especially at the station heads’ level.

Party loyalties are the norm in the selection of police station in-charges whose main task these days is to facilitate various crime syndicates and look the other way when law and order breaks down.

The handful of experienced and committed officers who remain are clueless about official policy on tackling the crime surge and have no certain idea about their future in case they take on the murderous thugs. They stay quiet and watch in great distress the crumbling of this primary state institution.

These police stations have to be rescued to rescue Karachi. A list of non-functioning police stations should be created to fathom the extent of the task of reform. A conservative official estimate suggests that almost 70 per cent of police stations are compromised — in the sense that they contribute nothing when it comes to saving lives. The redeeming feature is that the same estimate concludes that almost all local police stations have fairly accurate information about the source of trouble in their jurisdiction. This information base needs to be used to chart out a cleansing plan by more reputable police officers appointed all the way up in Karachi’s different zones.

These police officers should be interviewed by a high-level committee including the governor, chief minister, home minister, representatives of all major political parties, police chief, DG Rangers and the corps commander. That is the only way to make these appointments politically and administratively viable.

Equally critical is for these police stations to be well-staffed and adequately resourced. Most police stations are out-gunned by the criminals their personnel are supposed to fight. They have limited ammunition to dip into and have no back-up supplies to sustain the effort to cleanse the streets.

The situation is akin to the story told in the Gangs of New York, where the strongest of the gangs had thousands of members.

Their areas were so clearly demarcated that they resembled international borders.

Karachi’s gangs have huge stocks of weapons: one official inventory of illegal and lethal weapons puts the number at 20 million. The lethality of these gangs can be measured by the number of hit men they collectively command. Almost 5,000 documented killers operate in the city, says PPP Senator Faisal Raza Abidi, who admits most of them are politically protected.

To uproot this mafia requires strong fortification of police stations through a specially designed package of resources that does not run out every third week. The army and the FC have in reserve considerable piles of weapons, some of which have been given to police in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The threat level in Karachi is not too different from that posed by the Taliban in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In fact given the beastly nature of killing in Karachi it is hard to distinguish who is more brutal — those who slaughter in the name of religion or those who chop, quarter and hang in the name of party politics or for land grabbing.

Moreover, Karachi is the national economic supply-line and hence of unparalleled importance to national security. A well-armed, well-resourced and properly mandated network of police stations should be the key to saving this centre for national stability.

To make these police stations more effective, a Karachi-specific intelligence grid needs to be put in place. The ISI and the MI have detailed information maps available about the gang bases and their patrons. This is dynamic data that is updated daily — sometimes hourly.

To make the police and their operations more effective the civilian and military institutions need to work as one on the intelligence front and share their records in a sincere manner.Having positioned these blocs of state writ across the bloodied terrain of Karachi — indeed new police stations should also be created to better manage the terrain — attention must be paid to the check-posts in the city. As of now, these are weakly manned and exceedingly unreliable, more a pain to the unsuspecting motorcyclist with his family than the mobile death squads who move as freely as mobile-snatchers. These check posts have to be augmented and in exceedingly volatile zones should be multilayered involving the police, the Rangers, FC and in some cases even the army.

The logic of establishing check-posts should correspond to the pattern of gang movement and areas of gang operations. These check-posts should all be so laid out that these form useful rings of round-the-clock security.

Parallel to this effort should be the plan to create tightly run and heavy check-posts on all routes to Karachi. If the city has to be stabilised then the transnational supply lines of weapons and drugs must be choked without which the police will never be able to cope with the challenge of law and order.

But the success of this general plan to revive the writ of the police through functional police stations hinges on the critical decision by the political parties to stop using criminal syndicates as a means to secure and expand political turfs. They ought to know that violence breeds more violence, and in the end eats up, everything including those who unleash and sponsor it.

The writer is a senior journalist at DawnNews.