The blast at Lahore’s Anarkali has not only revealed lapses and fault lines within the security setup of major cities; it has inadvertently uncovered a serious and worrying reality: most CCTV cameras operated under the Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA) are offline. Installed across the city, the safe city project was conceived and implemented as an essential tool in preventing terrorism. According to reports, much of the system’s components, primarily the cameras are dysfunctional, which indicates that the present government has made little to no effort in maintaining them. That the suspect in the Anarkali bombing case was detected on a privately installed CCTV camera rather than a safe city one should be a source of embarrassment for the provincial government. In addition to around 30 per cent of the cameras installed being dysfunctional for over two years, cellular network coverage also remains compromised as many 4G towers are without backup. This means that during power outages, emergency calls to ‘15’ simply don’t go through.
As per reports, only 2000 of the 8000 CCTV cameras are currently in full functional condition. For a province witnessing a resurgence of terrorism, one would hope more attention and resources would be diverted towards efforts to create and maintain a more robust, dependable and technologically sound intelligence and surveillance gathering infrastructure. The existence of such a system would not only aid in thwarting incidents of terrorism by providing crucial actionable intelligence but also help detect perpetrators of heinous crimes such as the one in Anarkali. This would lead to arrests and punishments being handed out but more importantly would make it possible to question and interrogate detained suspects for leads that would in turn contribute further towards the anti-terrorism effort. The Punjab government must not take this aspect of law enforcement lightly as it is a crucial cog in a complex machine that has to work properly, efficiently and around the clock to be effective. It is hoped that corrective measures are taken immediately rather than being delayed as there is a very real cost attached to such procrastination: more death on the streets of Punjab’s capital.
