KARACHI: The Supreme Court directed the Sindh chief secretary on Wednesday to furnish a report by July 28 about what action had been taken against the senior police officers having a patchy service record.

A three-member bench of the apex court headed by Justice Mushir Alam was hearing a petition about inaction against the police officials involved in criminal activities but enjoying field postings without any departmental action.

At the outset of the hearing, Additional Inspector General of the Counter-Terrorism Department Sanaullah Abbasi, the head of a committee appointed by the apex court to scrutinise the service record of the policemen, submitted an interim report.

The report said that the committee had so far scrutinised the service record of 109,320 personnel/officials while record of 12,361 personnel was examined over suspicion of having a patchy record.

It added that 352 police officials were recommended for punishment for their patchy service record and 1,182 were cleared of the suspicion of having a patchy record while 1,534 were summoned for personal hearing and finalised with recommendations.

The CTD chief in the report said that on recommendations of the committee the competent authority had taken action against the personnel having patchy records after fulfilling formalities such as issuing them show-cause notices and giving a second opportunity to defend themselves.

The report further maintained that so far 17 officials had been dismissed from service, 122 sent on compulsory retirement and 11 officials opted for voluntary retirement.

The figures led Justice Alam to believe that the law and order situation was not improving because more than 12,000 policemen themselves were involved in criminal activities.

The bench asked Advocate General barrister Zamir Ghumro why action was not being taken against the senior police officers involved in criminal activities.

The bench members told the AG that such discrimination would not work as action was being taken only against junior officers and seniors were spared.

The bench directed the chief secretary to appear in court with a report, clearly showing what action the government had taken against the police officers (working in grade-17 and above), who had patchy service records.

AIG Abbasi also informed the bench that the Sindh government had approved the PC-I of a Rs152.04 million project, Computerisation of Human Resource of Sindh Police, to computerise data of the police officials and officers. An amount of Rs50.209m has been released for the first fiscal year. However, the AIG sought more time to complete the task of scrutinising the police personnel.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2017