LAHORE: Nearly 85 per cent of the Punjab police’s budget is spent on the salary of its staff, and 90pc of this goes into paying constables who are acting as menial workers of the law-enforcement system, having neither any policing nor management functions.
The remaining 15pc of the Rs100 billion annual budget is for operations and development, reflecting how lacking in resources this segment is.
Investigations into why police, who are being prepared to fight terrorism, are unable to control even petty crime reveal serious management faults in the force’s structure.
There are loose ends at the operational and management levels. There are defined rules which are not followed. Except for details of salary, there is no readily available inventory of items like vehicles and arms and ammunition in use. At least the home department does not have it.
However, Punjab Inspector General of Police Khan Baig says his department is not in that bad a shape and improvements are being made to prepare police to combat modern-day crime, specifically terrorism. conducted in a highly sophisticated manner.
He also says his department does have an inventory and that everything is on record. “It is not possible to work without an inventory.”
But this inventory is not to be found.
Background interviews with police and senior Punjab government officials show that an overwhelming number of the 180,000-strong Punjab police force is of constables. Their budget this year reportedly is Rs70bn. Yet the spending generally goes up to Rs100bn by the end of the financial year.
The lowly constable
The constable, with his heavy burden, has no administrative or mainstream policing authority or function. He mainly performs guard duty, or is used to escort processions. In other words, constables are minions at the beck and call of their seniors.
And they fare poorly in all policing aspects and are often the cause of complaints, with criticism ranging from inefficiency to accusations of extortion and abuse of authority.
Police station-level policing is the function of only 5pc of the total force, which includes junior officers of the rank of assistant sub-inspectors to inspectors who have the powers to arrest or investigate. Sub-inspectors and inspectors are the “ugly” public face of the force.
Their prospects of promotion are also quite low. For a majority of these junior police officers the promotion ladder ends at the supervisory rank of deputy superintendent of police (DSP). Not many reach this end-rank. If they are lucky they become DSPs only by the close of their service and go home without getting access to the policymaking corridors.
The SHO domain
The Police Service of Pakistan (PSP) starts from the rank of assistant superintendent (ASP), which is equivalent to the rank of DSP. These officers rule the department and can even go on to become IG without having any actual real-time experience of police station duty, of which investigation is a vital part. The police bureaucracy considers itself the face of the force, though in reality the criminal justice system is run by the station house officer (SHO).
Police stations now have two streams — operations and investigation. Investigation is considered the actual job but in practice, often, those who are not considered fit for operations are posted as investigators. The alleged unwritten criterion for the posting of SHOs is the right link at the right level. This leaves them beholden to their benefactors.
Not only this; quite routinely SHOs are transferred without allowing them the prescribed three-year tenure, depriving the department of officers who understand the dimensions of crime at the street level.
Funds for the working of police stations like money to be spent on transport and stationery are given to the district police officers (DPOs). The distribution is often not need-based and allegedly depends on the sweet will of DPOs.
Senior policemen and other government officials agree that the problem lies at the sub-divisional and police station level. This, they say, cannot be resolved without a realignment of the police department.
“The seams joining the PSP officers and those involved in actual policing below them are bursting under the pressure of crime,” says a former IG who did not want to be named. “The top brains in the PSP move up without getting hardcore policing experience. And the actual officers [in the field] go home without any access to policymaking. It is a yawning gap; in fact it is the mother of all ills in the police department which is cracking under the burden of a non-productive army of constables.”
But incumbent IG Khan Baig denies his department is in bad shape. He says investments are being made to handle pressure that is increasing because of threats of terrorism. Rules and procedures, too, are being fast simplified to turn the Punjab police into a combat-ready institution.
But he does admit that only one or 2pc of his department’s budget is being spent on operations. He agrees that the salary of constables eats up almost the whole of the budget and says that realising this, the department intends to recruit people in the ranks of sub-inspectors and above to have an efficient force.
The IG speaks of plans to enhance police capability and says that initially a digital command and control system is being introduced in Lahore, which will start functioning in a year.
Waqas Nazir, Assistant IG, sees no problem in maintaining a huge force of constables and keeping the hardcore police officials with experience in the field away from the higher ranks occupied by PSP officers. “Police need a strong force to create the fear of law and reduction in the number of constables will do otherwise,” he argues.
Mr Nazir says the Police Rules 1934 clearly define what police should do. According to him, the PSP is there to think of ways to make the low-ranking policemen follow the rules and perform better.
“A mixing up (of the two types of police cadres) will disturb the excellent system provided by the rules,” he says. “Discretionary powers at lower levels will create serious human rights problems.”
AIG Nazir points out that maintaining law and order is not the sole responsibility of police. “It is a collective responsibility of society, police, the judiciary and the prisons department. It is society which produces criminals. I can arrest [a criminal] but punishing him under the law is perhaps not under my control. It is not my authority to prevent convicts from becoming gangsters in jails. But you will blame me because I am the face of the criminal justice system,” he says.
But he does agree that improvements are in order. “We must become a learning institution. We deal with a society that is changing.”