Punjab’s Crime Control Department was set up to fight crime. Its own record of alleged extrajudicial killings suggests it has started producing crime instead.

In February 2025, the Punjab government created a new police body, the Crime Control Department, or CCD, and presented it as a firm answer to crime. Less than a year later, it has become known for something else: a rising count of alleged extrajudicial killings that has drawn criticism from human rights groups and left an uncomfortable question hanging over the province: has the department built to control crime become one of the sources of it? Looking at its record so far, “Crime Committing Department” starts to sound less like a jab and more like a fair description.

The numbers are hard to get past. A fact-finding report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) found that at least 924 suspects were killed in alleged encounters carried out by the CCD between 15 April and 15 December 2025. Over the same stretch, only a handful of police officers died. That gap doesn’t look like the result of real gunfights. It looks like the product of staged confrontations  and HRCP’s investigators say they found the same pattern repeating across districts, consistent enough to point to policy rather than........

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