Citation

Raza SS. Pak. J. Criminol. 2020; 12(1): i-iv.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Pakistan Society of Criminology)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

George Flyod's incident led to immense outpouring of shock, grief, and sympathy for the victim across the world. In the US it resulted in uprisings of multiracial masses that ended up in riots, vandalism, and violence. Elsewhere in the world it appealed to mass rallies, protests and expression of anger. Leftist analysts called the uprisings in the US a revolution, while the rights an insurrection. Some called for a fresh series of police reforms, while others demanded defunding and disbanding the police. Some highlighted the growing economic inequality, others political racial discrimination, and yet others socio-cultural problems of the multicultural American society. In short, the Floyd incident has pointed to a number of problems in the American polity.

On the other hand, in South Asia the Floyd incident received wide coverage and media discussion. However, this incident has not been taken as an example to revisit police violence in our own countries. Rather the typical response has been to ignore it as peculiar to the US where racism is a harsh everyday reality. Hence in our countries the administrative and law enforcement dimensions of the Floyd incident and the larger debate on the role of police in a multicultural democratic society have been overlooked. Therefore, instead of learning lessons for reforms our institutional approach has been to singularize, exceptionalize, and deny the problem with our own police and law enforcement system.

What we need to acknowledge, to begin with, is the fact of matter that our police and other law enforcement agencies in South Asia also regularly perpetrate...

Language: en