In 2007, the then government launched a project to modernise the working of the Islamabad police, to computerise data of all police stations of the city and put it online for instant access to its high command as a step towards introducing e-policing in the federal capital territory.

Present Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan added new urgency to the project in 2013 by ordering the local administration and police to complete the task within three months.

However, nine years of efforts have resulted in nothing more than the computerisation of the FIR and roznamcha (daily diary) of police stations.

City police officers feel frustrated that despite the purchase and installation of equipment and the development of software for e-policing the manual system lingers on.

“Now two parallel systems exist, with the difference that the new one exists only partially,” said one officer. “What is the fun in doing the same on computer if the police rules and the CrPC require the moharrar of police station to write down public complaints by hand and maintain all record manually, and the investigation officers do same with the cases in their hands?”

Obviously, the officers given the task of computerizing police paperwork overlooked many essentials in their rush to introduce e-policing.

A senior police officer identified three major requirements without meeting which e-policing and the computerisation of police records would indeed have no legal value.

“First of all, amendment is required in police rules and CrPC,” he told Dawn. According to the police rules and CrPC, police work and records, including FIR, zimnies and roznamcha have to be handwritten.

“Computer-generated FIRs have no value in law,” he said, recalling that a judge presented one demanded a handwritten one.

Although the law can be amended by just adding the word “computerised” along with handwritten, so far no recommendation or draft has been prepared by the police department. Once the amendment is drafted it would have to go to the Islamabad chief commissioner’s office for vetting and then to the interior ministry and the law ministry for the same before being sent to the parliament for legislation.

But the amendment alone would not be enough. Once it is made, police will have to be trained to use computers and maintain records digitally. More importantly, courts also should be similarly equipped to receive electronic data. At present, it all forms a paper trail as the majority of police moharrars and investigation officers are computer illiterate.

Low-ranking police officials, from head constable to inspector, have no idea how to operate a computer.

“They have always been producing handwritten reports. That is their comfort zone,” said a police officer reflecting on the difficulty in teaching them computers.

There is no way the police prosecution department could forward a computer generated case file to court for trial, nor do the courts have computers to read them. “Same holds true for the exchange of legal documents between police and the executive magistrate,” said an official of the capital administration.

“In effect, the e-FIR and e-roznamcha produced these days benefit mainly the senior officers who find it difficult to read the handwriting of moharrirs,” he added.

Other police records - there are a whole lot of them - are still maintained manually despite the risk of it being tampered with, especially police investigations. Full computerisation will see an entry in one register appear in all 24 registers kept in a police station, and a single command will retrieve the data about any person stored in any e-register.

It will be a great boon to honest police official in their work. Just imagine the range of rosters which may contain the information an investigator is seeking: FIR, roznamcha, standing orders, proclaimed offenders, correspondence, character verification, fingerprints and pendency of cases, sector book, surveillance of convicts, history of proclaimed offenders, record of arrestees, opinion book of seniors, inspection book, official property, licences and permits, case property, arms and ammunition in possession of people, road certificate, police gazette of crime detection, police rule, secret register and station house officer diary.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2016