Last year in August, Mughees and Muneeb, two brothers were brutally beaten and killed by a mob in Sialkot. The entire scene was recorded on video and shown across the media. There were three questions that arose in my mind that day: where was the police? Why did onlookers allow this horrid thing to happen? And who in his right mind found this scene amusing enough to record?

A week ago, a different video went viral. It showed an unarmed man being shot by a group of Rangers in Karachi. He screams, drops to the ground and begs for help for one minute and eleven seconds before he loses consciousness. He was still breathing when he was finally taken to the hospital, but eventually he died due to massive blood loss. His name was Sarfaraz Shah. He was 19.

A cameraman for the Sindhi television channel Awaz captured the killing on video. By the next day, cameraman Abdul Salaam Soomro reportedly started receiving death threats. According to a report in Dawn, Zaryab Khaskheli, the assistant news director of Awaz, informed Interior Minister Rehman Malik as well as Sindh government officials about the threats, but no measures had been implemented.

Violence is everywhere in Pakistan. And for every problem we face, we seem to favour a militant response.

Thankfully, some leaders and activists from across the country spoke out against the extrajudicial killing of Shah. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said that the paramilitary men involved in this incident would be prosecuted, while AFP reported that Major General Aijaz Chaudhry said, “The incident is deplorable. The Rangers have no authority to kill any unarmed individual and they can fire only in self-defence.”

Zohra Yusuf, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said in a statement that the killing was “yet another indication of law enforcement personnel becoming increasingly trigger-happy.”

Ali Dayan Hasan, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Pakistan was quoted by the Guardian as saying, “What we are seeing are visual records of what we have long documented, which is the culture of impunity within Pakistani law enforcement agencies, what is becoming clear is that the free-for-all, the culture of wanton abuse and killing, is becoming untenable in the age of new media and cell phone cameras.”

It’s time to ask ourselves many hard questions: for how long will we ignore that the people who have vowed to guard us citizens are a threat to our existence? Why do citizens take the law into their own hands? Why do onlookers either silently stand and watch crimes happen or blindly walk away? And why do authorities bestowed with our trust repeatedly break it?

Too many people in our nation are desensitised to incidents such as the Sarfaraz Shah killing. They conveniently convince themselves that the guy deserved it because, well, he was a “robber.” What happened to the concept of being innocent until proven guilty? And if it still exists, who decides the innocent from the guilty? The man with the biggest gun?

Yes, our judicial system is flawed. Justice is not easily attained: not for a common man, a Baloch dissident, a slain journalist or an assassinated provincial governor. But we can never condone extrajudicial killings and vigilante justice. Never.

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