About 45,000 incidents of street crimes, mugging reported so far this year in Pakistan's Karachi

Karachi: Most people in Karachi city of Pakistan's Sindh province feel unsafe as the metropolitan city reported about 45,000 incidents of street crimes and mugging in the first eight months of 2024, the police said on Monday.

Last year, 118 people were killed in street crimes and mugging incidents while this year the figure is close to 100, the Police Citizens Liaison Committee said.

Most people in Karachi feel unsafe as the rate of violent crime has soared in the metropolitan city of nearly 20 million population, said Bashir Babu, a factory worker who has been a mugging victim twice.

“Criminals are operating brazenly during daytime or night and one doesn’t feel safe going out as the fear of mugging hangs over you,” claimed Babu.

The spread of social media has only added to the environment of anxiety and fear in the city as every day new videos are uploaded showing criminals snatching valuables in broad daylight on busy streets, at restaurants, at traffic lights, outside ATMs, at barbershops, even at mosques.

In such an environment, the people of Karachi are now faced with a new crime menace, the “Auto-Rickshaw gang”.

“Auto-rickshaws remain an affordable and main mode of public transport for many people but in recent days there have been several cases of passengers, including ladies, being robbed of their valuables and belongings while using these rickshaws,” police officer Abid Fazal said.

Fazal said they investigated cases where some criminal gangs were linked up with some auto-rickshaw drivers and teamed up to rob passengers.

“The modus operandi is the driver after carefully studying his passengers makes a call on whether they have cash and valuables with them," he said.

Fazal said the driver then uses his phone to either text the drop-off location or give the impression to the unsuspecting passenger he is talking to his family and lays out all the details of where he is.

Sumayya Firdous, a bank teller who was robbed of all her belongings just the other day while returning home, reported to the police that she never suspected the driver was informing his gang about where she was headed.

“As soon as we neared my drop-off location, two people on motorbikes with guns told the driver to stop the rickshaw to the side and one of them came in and sat with me and calmly took everything. I never suspected the driver was involved until the public had gathered there and stopped the driver from leaving. A police mobile, which arrived later, checked his phone,” she recalled.

No wonder ineffective policing, growing corruption in police ranks, and general apathy from government and police officials in response to complaints about the law and order situation in Karachi has led citizens to now resort to mob justice, she said.

On Saturday, one robber was lynched and killed in the densely populated Federal B area after he and two others tried to rob a house.

Two of the robbers managed to escape with their lives.

There have been other incidents of vigilante justice where people have used firearms to kill robbers or beat them to death if any of them are caught.

This month itself there have been at least four recorded incidents of mob justice by people enraged by robberies.

In one incident, people chased down two fleeing men, killing one and injuring the other, before police rescued them.

Dr Humaira Yousuf, an expert on crime and violence who works for a Karachi-based Centre for Research and Security, said mob justice was a worrying trend in Karachi.

“People are frustrated when public trust in the law enforcement agencies is low.” This year, dozens of police officers and constables have been fired or suspended after being implicated with criminal gangs involved in street crime.