Pakistan’s police departments often highlight arrest figures to showcase their performance, presenting annual totals to justify crackdowns and progress in tackling crime.
An arrest, however, is only the beginning of a criminal case. What happens afterwards, whether charges are filed, cases reach trial and convictions are secured, offers a more meaningful picture of how effectively the criminal justice system is functioning.
An arrest, by itself, does not establish guilt. Once a suspect is arrested, investigators must gather sufficient evidence before submitting a challan or investigation report to the courts. The accused then moves through prosecution, trial and, ultimately, a verdict.
Figures from several law enforcement agencies show that the numbers tend to fall sharply at each stage.
The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA)’s 2024 annual report provides one example. The agency made almost 25,000 arrests and registered more than 10,000 cases, but submitted around 6,600 challans to trial courts. Just over 2,000 of those cases resulted in convictions. These figures cannot be treated as a simple arrest-to-conviction rate because cases take different amounts of time to progress through the system, but the scale of the decline is nevertheless significant.
The FIA’s individual wings show a similar pattern. Its Immigration Wing arrested more than 19,000 suspects in 2024, but submitted around 4,200 challans and secured about 1,700 convictions. The Anti-Corruption Wing reported 1,900 arrests, 1,000 challans and just over 100 convictions during the same year.
The situation is little different at the provincial level. In November 2024, the Punjab Police reported that more than 60,000 people had been arrested during a province-wide crackdown on electricity theft. Nearly 100,000 cases were registered and more than 60,000 challans submitted, but only about 8,400 convictions were recorded. That does not mean that only 13.7% of those arrested were ultimately convicted, since some cases may have yielded results outside the reporting deadline. But the disparity illustrates how far arrest figures can be from final outcomes.
The same trend continued into 2026. By June 6, Punjab Police had reported 20,000 arrests in similar electricity-theft cases. Nearly 18,000 challans were submitted, while courts awarded 2,400 punishments.
There is also a significant gap between an investigation being launched and a case actually reaching court. In 2024, the Lahore High Court was told that more than 300,000 criminal cases in Punjab were awaiting the submission of challans. At one point, the court was informed that 362,000 investigation reports were pending before trial courts. By November, Punjab authorities said the backlog had been cleared and around 380,000 challans submitted. The episode nevertheless highlighted the scale of the work that can remain unfinished long after an arrest is announced.
The picture becomes even more concerning in cases involving violence, abuse and harassment of women and children. Official Punjab figures for 2025 showed that fewer than 1,000 cases among roughly 60,000 registered during 2024 ended in convictions and punishment. Acquittals were more than twice the convictions, with investigations facing criticism over weak challans and problems with evidence collection.
None of this means that every case that fails to end in conviction represents a failure by the police. Prosecution, witnesses, forensic facilities, judicial delays and other weaknesses in the justice system can all affect the outcome. Nor does a low conviction rate, by itself, prove that police investigations are incompetent. But the figures do highlight the limits of using arrests as a measure of police performance.
Making an arrest is relatively easy to publicize; ensuring that an investigation is properly conducted, evidence is collected, a sound challan is submitted and a case reaches a lawful conclusion is considerably more difficult.
Pakistan’s policing debate needs to look beyond the headline number of people taken into custody. Arrests matter, but they are not verdicts. A more useful measure of performance would track what happens to those cases afterwards, from investigation and challan submission to trial and final judgment. Until those outcomes receive the same attention as arrest figures, the number of people put in handcuffs will remain an impressive but incomplete measure of justice in the country.