"They Caught Us Without Any Reason": Waste Pickers' Encounters with Police, Crime and the State in Rawalpindi–Islamabad, Pakistan

Rabail Ghazanfar

No r4mh2_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Informal waste pickers (rag-pickers) are routinely portrayed as a source of urban crime, yet little research asks how they themselves experience the police, the state and the illicit economies around them. Drawing on semi-structured interviews in Urdu with 25 waste pickers aged roughly 10 to 50, living in informal settlements (katchi abadis) in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, Pakistan, this article examines their encounters with law-enforcement bodies, their involvement in and victimisation by crime, and their access to government and NGO support. Thematic analysis, informed by street-level bureaucracy and general strain theory, identified four themes: (1) extractive policing, with arbitrary detention, bribes as the price of release, and police ties to employers and dealers; (2) crime as coerced and relational, with drug use and sex work driven by peers, clients, gangs and families; (3) the absent state, with no participant having received government or NGO assistance and BISP applications going unanswered; and (4) constrained pathways into waste picking driven by family need, orphanhood, homelessness and physical incapacity. Most participants said they would leave waste picking if given support. The article calls for protective, non-extractive policing, safeguarding responses to children in sex work and drug use, and outreach that makes social protection reachable. Based on the author's MPhil thesis (National Defence University, Islamabad, 2020). Also archived on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22981971.

Date: 2026-10-06
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:r4mh2_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/r4mh2_v1

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