LAHORE: The Punjab Police Integrated Command & Control Centre (PPIC3), once termed a state-of-the-art project, is facing multiple issues, trigged by alleged mismanagement, despite being an important step for achieving modern policing.

It has been used as key resource for collection of evidence about the terrorist activities of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other law and order situations like the Mall Road suicide bombing in 2017 and lawyers’ attack on the Punjab Institute of Cardiology in 2019. The Punjab Safe City Authority (PSCA), established under the PPIC3, also played an important role in bringing international cricket back to the country through the Pakistan Super League (PSL). The PSCA officials led by their chief visited Dubai Expo 2020 and highlighted PPIC3 as a success story.

However, the PSCA is now is facing problems like dysfunctional CCTV cameras and shortage of staff and no steps are being taken to improve the situation. Sources in the PPIC3 Centre Lahore have revealed that on an average, 40pc of the cameras in the city are found dysfunctional due to poor operations and maintenance services by the PSCA. They say the maximum number of offline cameras is in the Saddar division where 530 of them are not functional while most cameras are functional in Model Town division where only 280 out of 1,108 cameras are offline.

40pc dysfunctional cameras, staff shortage afflict PSCA, PPIC3

An official says 33 cameras are offline on the VIP movement routes also, jeopardising security of the important personalities mobilising on an everyday basis. The PSCA had installed dynamic cameras also on the roof of Police Response Unit vehicles for the first time but none of them is functioning, the official claims.

There are reports that the PSCA management is busy to shift the blame to its predecessor rather than making decisions for improving the system and resolving the issues pending for the last two years. Due to poor management, the situation is reportedly getting worse by the day and hardware and software of the PPIC3 are gradually going out of order with no replacements.

On the other hand, according to an official, nearly 100 trained and qualified officers have already left the PSCA and no recruitments were made since 2020 to replace them. The police communication officers (PCOs) have also opted to move to the court against the authority for regularisation of their jobs.

The official further says the coverage of most modern telecommunication, 4G- Advanced system, has been affected by poor maintenance. The 4G-Advanced Signals in the Civil Lines, Iqbal Town and City divisions are weak, which delays coordination of 15 police emergency calls.

The jurisdictions of police stations of Shahdara, Shahdara Town, Raiwind, Hair, Hadiyara, Batapur and Manga Mandi don’t have 4G LTE signals anymore, the official claims. In such areas, the coordination between PPIC3 and Dolphin Force is done through private phones, which is insecure communication as well as it has no recording facility.

The official says the police emergency 15 system deals with 50,000 emergency calls across the province and the data from the system used by Punjab police for performance evaluation and filing of the FIRs is also affected by poor maintenance of hardware.

“Out of 42 work stations, only 32 are operational and many of them do not have headphones,” the official says. He fears that if the situation continues, the rest of the Lahore and Kasur will also be out surveillance coverage as much hyped facial recognition software is not in use due to lack of proper maintenance and care of the IT infrastructure by the current management.

PSCA MD DIG Kamran Khan has put the blame on frequent power outages for dysfunctional cameras, terming the outages one of the main factors behind the issue in Lahore and claiming that the power generators installed for back-up support are also proving insufficient.

“Approximately, 5,000 cameras are in working condition out of the total around 8,000,” he says and claims that the authority is trying its best to rectify the problems to keep the maximum number of cameras functional.

He defends the authority while talking about the complaints of the PCOs regarding lack of facilities like provision of headphones.

“A headphone costs Rs20,000 and in many cases, the communication officers carelessly use them. It is difficult for the authority to purchase such expensive headphones every day,” DIG Khan says.

About emergency 15 and other facilities, he claims the PSCA has been trying to maintain services using all available resources.

“The complaints of suspension of service delivery are a routine matter world over, particularly, when we deal with highly sophisticated gadgets and equipments and the authority is trying hard to rectify the complaints,” he adds.

It is important to recall that Prime Minister Imran Khan had visited the project in February 2020 and he was impressed with its performance but it seems the negligence of the Punjab Police has led to this sorry state of affairs of the Rs20bn project that is going down the hill.

Inspector General of Police Rao Sardar Ali Khan has served this project as Managing Director (MD) PSCA for more than one year and he should take notice of the situation.

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2021