TWO tragedies — the assassination of JUI-F leader Khalid Mahmood Soomro and the suicide bombing at a Shikarpur imambargah in recent times — have exposed the basic edifice of the police administration ie the police station in Sindh.

It can be argued that greater monitoring on the part of the police station staff could have prevented or reduced the impact of the attacks, although the performance of police units working on the case at present must be appreciated.

In the process of massive urbanisation, rapid population growth and increasing criminality, the police station, the fundamental unit of policing in the country, has not kept pace with new and growing challenges.

A police station derives its authority and legal powers from the Police Act 1861, Police Rules 1934, the Police Order 2002, and a plethora of standing orders issued from time to time. The working of the thana ought to be all inclusive.

British India catered to all that was required of a police station administration. From patrol staff to armoury, from intelligence gathering and investigation powers to arrest, from preventive powers to ensuring public order in the area, the thana had it all. It also had a proper complaints mechanism, a surveillance system and an oversight feature through its 25 registers. Today, the spirit of these functions has been lost, perhaps because of mismatched priorities, indifference of the senior police command and socio-economic factors.

Today’s police stations, with some exceptions, are in a dilapidated condition, short of staff, low on efficiency and with almost no forensic capability.

They are even without properly maintained patrol vehicles. At least, that is the case for most parts of rural Sindh and some areas in Karachi. While the police management has invested in raising and developing specialised units to investigate and detect specialised crimes, it is the police station which still continues to be the pivot of the police administration and serves as the front unit to address and remove people’s grievances.

It is relevant to mention the National Action Plan at this point. All tasks laid out in NAP are primarily those which used to be carried out, and that too effectively, by an efficient thana in the not too distant past. That the police station’s below-par performance has led to a new set of laws and policies over time is not surprising.

Police stations continue to be the pivot of law enforcement.

Due to various reasons, the efficiency of the thana has remained low, hence dedicated plans have been chalked out to stem the rise of terrorism. While one does appreciate the need for such efforts to deal with national challenges, the neglect of the thana has been a blow to a number of complainants.

The solution is that the functions of the police station must be made simpler. In the West, most police stations function on the basis of a one-window operation, which makes it less complicated for a citizen to lodge his or her complaint or report a crime. Similarly, thanas in this country should facilitate a citizen, rather than discourage him or her from visiting it.

Often described as the gatekeeper to the criminal justice system, the functions of the police revolve primarily around the police station. Reporting a complaint or crime should be along the lines of the system in KP after the recent police reforms there. We are beginning to see this happen in Sindh as well. Sadly, these initiatives should have been launched long ago. In order to increase efficiency, one has to invest in automated solutions to keep a strong check on resources and their utilisation.

Almost all components of the police station suffer these days because of manual checks on their functions. That is simply not workable anymore. As for the conduct of the police station staff, this has to be changed from within. There is no one solution to address this particular aspect.

Poorly maintained manual registers should be automated as files would then be easier to maintain and update. For an efficient era of law enforcement to begin, police stations require training for their staff members to deal with modern technology. Efforts have been made in the past, in fits and starts, but these have clearly not been enough.

The Sindh police have embarked on an exercise to set up a functioning online first information report that is user friendly. It is being undertaken at a selected few police stations and should be replicated in other jurisdictions across the province.

Besides, record-keeping and infrastructure need to drastically improve. For, if the most important aspect of police station work is to be reduced to case registration, then this can be simply be done at complaint centres. However, the fact is that the police station is the face of the huge apparatus of the police and more importantly the first refuge for the victim.

The writer is a police officer.

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2015

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