LAHORE: Inspector General of Police Shoaib Dastagir has evaluated the performance of the senior field police officers by allocating “points” under a newly launched accountability mechanism.

The points were allocated to the district police officers and city police officers following a detailed analysis of the statistics of heinous crime under various heads/categories including murder, kidnapping for ransom, rape, motor vehicle snatching etc.

The performance will be made part of office record to help the Central Police Office (CPO) for future appointments of the police officers against field assignments.

During recent high-profile massive crime meeting which lasted more than 10 hours or so, the senior police officers under the command of the IGP analysed the performance of the field officers. Negative and positive marks were allocated to the DPOs/CPOs against their good and bad performance in the fight against heinous crime.

Lahore police among those who get bad points

Interestingly, Lahore police was among those districts/cities which obtained 8 bad points for showing poor performance.

Bad points allocation: The DPO Rajanpur obtained 40 bad points, DPO Muzaffargarh 29, DG Khan 17, Rahim Yar Khan 16, Multan CPO 11, Bahawalpur 15, Jhelum, 14, Vehari 16, Khanewal 13, Lodhran 4, Attock 20, Pakpattan 12, Okara 2 and Gujrat DPO obtained 4 bad points.

The DPOs of Rajanpur, DG Khan and Rahim Yar Khan could not perform better due to their other important assignments including fight against coronavirus and operation against hardened criminals in Kacha areas.

Good points allocation: Norowal DPO was at the top among his colleagues heading rural districts by achieving highest 43 points followed by the Bhakkar DPO 39, Nankana DPO 38 points, Bahawalnagar 36 and Mandi Bahauddin 31 and Chiniot got 31 points.

Similarly, Gujranwala CPO also showed best performance as compare to his colleagues heading city districts by obtaining 34 points followed by Faisalabad 21 and Rawalpindi 2 good points.

Besides, the Chakwal DPO secured 22 points, Hafizabad 13 points, Sheikhupura 21 Kasur DPO 17, Sahiwal 9, Khushab 8, Sargodha 9, Jhang 5, Sialkot 14 and Toba Tek Singh DPO secured 8 good points.

Paradigm shift: Talking about the new system, a senior official told Dawn, in a rare transition from fickle and arbitrary methods to evaluate the performance of field units, IGP Punjab Shoaib Dastagir has revamped the medieval evaluation system of police and has converged it to modern gauging system.

He said that the policing can broadly be bifurcated into prevention and investigation of crime.

“The Punjab police has embarked on a new journey for the quest of excellence in public service delivery setting high threshold levels utilizing international best practices for the execution operations as well as investigations”, he said.

This new system is devised to yield quality disposals,quantitative results and across the board accountability at all levels.

In this new scheme of performance appraisal, the theory of comparison with the crime figures ofthe previous year is spurned completely because it motivates the lower field ranks at the police station level to mitigate and fudge the crime figures through non-registration of FIRs to enhance their performance.

“Now the field units are only judged by the detection and investigation of criminal cases”, he said. Free registration of FIRs, a long dreamt expectation from the police, will take effect now.

He said new performance evaluating indicators have been punctiliously designed as the targets are not unattainable. The crime heads like murder, dacoity, robbery, kidnapping for ransom, dacoity/robbery with murder, vehicle/motorcycle snatching, vehicle/ motorcycle theft, rape and child abuse cases have been carefully selected for appraisal to attain an unequivocal picture of the district under review.

Under the new scheme, the districts of Punjab are divided into two classes: city districts and rural districts.

The City districts include Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala and Multan. All the rest are clubbed as rural districts for the sake of performance assessment.

The new system of evaluation has not remained oblivious to challaning of cases, the arrest of accused, recovery of case properties ( in case of crime against property), qualitative processes that facilitate conviction like identification parades of accused in the courts and other prosecutorial indicators are also analyzed.

“The performance computations of every rural district is examined against the cumulative average of all rural districts,” the official said.

A positive deviation of 5 points or more from the Punjab average earns one positive credit for the district under review and the districts bags one negative point in the case of negative difference.

“Same formula is applied to a city district which is compared with the combined average achieved by the five city districts of Punjab,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2020