POSTCOLONIAL policing has never been without challenges. Just as the colonial model had peculiarities for maintaining law and order in the colonies, every postcolonial country has encountered its own native and indigenous policing complexities. There is, however, a general agreement in most countries to shed authoritative styles in policing, as well as come to a consensus on delegation of duties.

As policing cultures evolve, local needs cannot be overlooked. Population explosion, unemployment, inflation, rural to urban migration and burgeoning slums; all have adversely affected prevention and detection of crime. What a beat or foot patrol officer was once capable of knowing about his neighbourhood has become much more challenging and intricate.

Even most of the developed world, not subject to colonisation, has embraced classification, categorisation, specialisation and segregation of police tasks. As a result, many countries’ police organisations have specialised units, such as anti-riot, operational command, counterterrorism, crime scene evidence collection, arms and narcotics control, homicide and serious crime, security management and organised crime investigation units. Their purpose is to ensure better human resource management, following the principle of having ‘the right man for the right job’. In this way, police officers can be identified by their particular interest, and trained and evaluated accordingly.

Officers cannot be expected to excel at every policing task.

The challenge of policing in Pakistan is twofold. Not only is the policing culture slowly transitioning from a postcolonial perspective to a service-oriented one, it is still largely based on the approach of ‘jack of all trades’. As damaging as this approach is for other public-sector departments, it directly affects the public’s image of the police.

Most citizens approaching a police station for some misfortune that has befallen them, are at an utter loss as to who to turn to. In spite of all the designations one may have encountered through media consumption, a first-time visitor grapples with the concepts of duty officer, munshi or muharrar (police station clerk), santry (sentinel), tafteeshi (investigating officer) and SHO sahib (station house officer).

This nomenclature is not self-explanatory, and it involves running from one to the other in a pre-determined order. Once this ordeal is over for the complainant, it sometimes becomes evident to him, during the course of investigation, that the officer assigned to his case is not suited to investigate that particular crime. The complainant is then left with the choice of initiating another lengthy formal procedure to be assigned another investigator.

Most competent and professional police managers, in order to find the right officer for a particular task, resort to their own intuitive formulae for human resource profiling. Since this is makeshift rather than institutionalised, and since there is a plethora of randomised short-term trainings without specialised focus, such profiling is only partially successful. This issue pertains more to career planning according to innate talent rather than the working capacity of police officers. If trained with focus and direction, and geared towards particular police units, along with meeting the minimum requirements set by the organisation for these units, police officers can perform exceptionally well.

One such example is the first-of-its-kind Homicide Investigation Unit of the Punjab Police, which became operational in 2015 and has gradually spread out to all the province’s districts. The idea of this unit was conceived while keeping in mind all the ground realities, including policing needs, of investigating the most heinous crime of murder. Optimum standards were established for investigators, who are selected to undergo specialised training and are provided with financial and operational resources, in order to investigate murders professionally.

These officers are not expected to perform any other policing task, and are supervised within a senior chain of command. As a result, the unit appears to have won, in large part, the trust of victims’ families, as well as exhibited speedy and quality delivery of justice. Contrary to prior norms, where murder investigations lingered for years on end, most cases are investigated within a few months, and the findings sent to the courts for trial.

The success of this policing model can pave the way for other dedicated units for police work. Since the police station is the first point of contact for a victim of crime accessing the criminal justice system, it is time that our police forces were formally and officially organised into functional units, and that career paths for officers were clearly delineated. This will improve the impact of their enthusiastic efforts, and improve the trust deficit between the public and the police.

The writer is a police officer.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2018