PESHAWAR, Oct 2: The NWFP police have demanded that the government should enhance the strength of the force by almost 100 per cent over a period of three years as per requirements of the Police Order 2002, official sources told Dawn here on Thursday.

According to the rules, the strength of the force needs to be increased from the existing 30,980 officials to 59,978 for the Frontier province, which has a population of 18.803m people.

“We require an additional force of 28,998 men in the coming three years to meet the international standard of policing,” a police official said.

The government had referred the issue to the provincial Finance Department, but police officials said that the department was not willing to foot the bill for increasing such a huge force due to financial constraints.

As per police rules 2.1, the NWFP police require 52 inspectors, 834 sub-inspectors, 1178 assistant sub-inspectors, 3,632 head constables and 23,302 full constables.

The demand needed to be fulfilled in three phases over a time period of three years.

Sources said that the main objectives of the demand was to kick off the newly-introduced system of separate investigation under the Police Order 2002.