The ‘Full-Fry’: Analysing the Practice of Encounter Killings as a Product of Police Vigilantism in Karachi

‘Encounters’ have been a notorious phenomenon in urban South Asia since the 1980s. They are essentially specific interactions between police officers and suspects in which the latter are shot dead by the police, with few or no police casualties. Encounters are further categorised into ‘genuine’ and ‘fake’ encounters in which the former refers to a spontaneous and unplanned shoot-out, but the latter is a reference to deaths in police custody that are presented to the media and ordinary citizens as actual shoot-outs (Belur, 2010). In urban South Asia, encounters are a form of extrajudicial killings that police routinely rely upon and politicians and civilians frequently advocate for. Recent scholarship has discussed encounters as a product of ‘police vigilantism’, a term that is used to explain how and why the police act outside the law in the deliverance of justice (Cooper-Knock and Owen, 2015; Jauregui, 2015; Kreuzer, 2016). In Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and financial capital, an encounter that results in the death of a suspect is colloquially referred to by the police as a ‘full-fry’. In spite of their prevalence, relatively little academic interest has been shown in understanding the practice of ‘full-fries’ or encounter killings in urban Pakistan. Through this paper, I fill this gap in scholarship by using the case of Karachi to show what factors and conditions facilitate the use of police encounters and how this practice has been legitimised and normalised due to the popularity of police vigilantism. Traditional scholarship that explores police use of deadly force can be divided into three approaches: individualistic, organisational, and structural (Friedrich, 1980). Individualistic approaches focus on the behaviours and beliefs of individual police officers to assess why certain officers use brute force while others do not (Holmes et al, 1998; Toch, 1996). Organisational approaches study institutional cultures to see how norms and ideas associated with using force are embedded into police departments and strengthened through training and socialisation (Alpert and MacDonald, 2001). Structural approaches take a macro-level analysis for understanding the socio-economic, political and bureaucratic influences exerted upon police departments that direct the actions of police officers and go further to explain how police can be used by states as agents of control (Jacobs and O’Brien, 1998; Chan, 1996; Chamlin, 1989). In this paper, I investigate what encounter killings specifically can tell us about police vigilantism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Karachi between 2015 and 2019, I argue that organisational and structural factors that provide popular legitimacy to police vigilantism create the dynamics necessary for the prevalence of police encounters. In return, however, public outrage over individual encounter killings is unlikely to delegitimise practices of police vigilantism if these organisational and structural factors remain unchanged. Therefore, by studying the phenomenon of encounter killings in Karachi, we can better understand how organisational and structural factors create the conditions necessary for police vigilantism in cities that are ridden with an assortment of violent actors challenging the authority of the state and the police.