EDITORIAL: Karachi’s own police statistics, released at the turn of the year, were meant to show improvement. They do show a decline in reported street crimes, from 71,105 in 2024 to over 64,000 in 2025. Yet in the same official picture sits the real indictment of how abnormal life in Pakistan’s largest city has become: more than 46,000 citizens lost cars or motorbikes in 2025, and over 17,000 lost mobile phones. A “reduction” that still leaves tens of thousands dispossessed at gunpoint or through theft is not a success story. It is a measure of how low the baseline has sunk.
The breakdown is stark even within the limited detail available. Police data says 6,683 vehicles were hijacked at gunpoint in 2025, including 302 cars and 6,381 motorbikes, compared to 8,370 the year before. Separately, 39,934 vehicles were stolen in 2025, including 1,813 cars and 38,121 motorbikes, compared to 43,382 in 2024. Phone snatching remains routine; the same data notes that 19,353 mobile phones were snatched in the corresponding period of 2024. Even if the direction of travel is marginally better, the level is still catastrophic.
And this is where the argument cannot stop at “reported” crimes. Karachi is a case study in the limits of headline policing. Official figures capture what enters the register, not what actually happens. Experts caution against drawing big conclusions from a comparison of just two years and point to a deeper problem: the absence of credible research and a lack of holistic data that includes what other stakeholders, such as paramedics and hospitals, may be seeing. That is the crux. Without a fuller data ecosystem, the state is managing narratives, not crime.
This is also where the thana culture becomes central, not incidental. Underreporting is not merely a statistical quirk; it is produced by incentives and fear. When citizens expect harassment, delay, or outright refusal at the police station, many simply do not report. When police performance is judged by reductions in registered crime, the system quietly rewards keeping cases off the books. The result is a city where the public cannot know the real scale of victimisation, and policymakers cannot design credible responses because they are working with partial, politically convenient numbers.
Karachi cannot afford this. It is the country’s principal port city and its commercial hub. Every week of unchecked street crime carries an economic cost that does not show up in police tallies: higher security spending by businesses, disrupted logistics, reduced retail activity after hours, and the slow flight of investment to safer jurisdictions. The macroeconomy feels it through confidence, costs, and lost productivity. So does the state through eroded legitimacy. This cycle has been going on uninterrupted for far too long.
The immediate requirement is to stop pretending that a single set of police figures can stand in for reality. Karachi needs a modern crime measurement system: regular victimisation surveys, a unified incident reporting framework across police, rescue services, and hospitals, and independent audits of registration practices. It also needs basic procedural reform at the thana level so that reporting a crime is not treated as a favour, a bargaining process, or a punishment for the complainant. None of this is glamorous. It is simply the machinery of a functioning city.
Until these systems are put in place, every debate about “crime reduction” will remain vulnerable to the same fatal flaw. No one, including the state, will be able to say with confidence how unsafe Karachi really is. For Pakistan’s most economically critical city, that uncertainty is not a technical gap. It is a governance failure.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
Comments