KARACHI, April 12: In an attempt to effectively fight crime and to respond to distress calls, the Muhafiz force and the police helpline ‘15’ are being merged to form a unified force within two weeks, it is learnt.

Currently, the two units are working independently to achieve a common goal but without any coordination and are thus unable to deliver properly.

According to sources, the decision has been taken in view of the poor performance of the helpline‘15’. A senior official associated with this unification project told Dawn that the present setup of this helpline service would be dissolved and replaced by a centralised 15 centre, work on which was in its final stages.

The centralised centre would be equipped with 100 telephone lines with a facility to record each incoming call, he said.

Commenting on the system in place, he said that if a citizen dialled ‘15’ from somewhere in Clifton, his call would get connected to the ‘15’ centre in North Nazimabad, from where it would be redirected to the relevant setup, thus wasting precious time and causing an inordinate delay in responding to a distress call.

The new system, however, had been designed to do away with this problem and to ensure a prompt response to the citizens’ complaints, he said.

The outgoing inspector-general of Sindh police, Azhar Ali Farooqi, told Dawn that under this soon to be introduced system, each vehicle of the Muhafiz force would be equipped with a tracker system which would help locate its current position through a digital map to be installed at the centralised call centre.

He said that upon receiving a distress call, the operator would locate the position of the closest Muhafiz vehicle and direct it to attend to the complaint, thus saving a considerable amount of time.

Mr Farooqi said that the new centralised 15 centre would start working within the next 15 days.

The chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, Sharfuddin Memon, said he had been advocating the integration of the Muhafiz force with the 15 helpline service for quite a long time. He termed the working of these two setups as separate units meaningless.

A senior police officer said that these days the 15 centres had almost become redundant and turned into mere chat rooms. He said that at the centralised call centre such non-serious calls would be monitored and any operator found indulging in unnecessary conversations would be taken to task. The police helpline 15 was actually activated by the former provincial police chief, Syed Kamal Shah. During his tenure, several 15 centres were inaugurated and vehicles were provided to each of these centres. Unfortunately, with the passage of time these mobile vans went off the roads. Some of these vehicles were used as escort mobiles for protocol duties and some were taken away by various police stations.

On the other hand, the Muhafiz force comprises 600 personnel belonging to the Sindh Reserve Police and withdrawn from different police stations having a sizable fleet of around 60 new police mobiles. Currently, there are around 20 to 25 police mobiles lying idle at the Muhafiz force base.

Brainchild of the former Sindh IG, retired Major Ziaul Hasan Khan, the Muhafiz force has been instructed to restrict themselves only to physical presence on the roads with an assumption that it would act as deterrence against crime.

The presence of the Muhafiz force helped at least to shift the crime from one place to another by the mere presence of its vehicle, if not able to eliminate the crime, an officer observed.