#police-impunity

#police-impunity

When armed officers from Pakistan's Crime Control Department raided Zubaida Bibi's home in Bahawalpur city in southern Punjab province last November, they took everything: mobile phones, cash, gold jewellery and her daughter's wedding dowry. They also took her sons. Within 24 hours, five members of her family were dead, killed in separate police encounters across different districts of Pakistan's Punjab the province that alone is home to more than half of the country's population.

Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the sequence of events, the indignant language and informational smokescreens felt nauseatingly familiar. It was as if someone had taken Israel's playbook for Gaza and tested it out stateside.