LAHORE, Feb 22: Lower police staff up to sub-inspectors cannot be transferred from districts of their recruitment (domicile) under the existing rules and professional requirements.
The existing rules were framed in 1934 to apply the Police Act of 1831 which has been abolished and replaced by the Police Order 2002.
The new law does provide transfer of police officials from one general area to another, but this is subject to its rules which have not as yet been framed.
This was stated by senior officials interviewed in view of a recent decision by the chief minister to transfer officials and officers from ASIs to DSPs from their home districts.
Officials said the existing rules of the defunct law stressed the need for local police to meet the basic professional need of maintaining a network that could have local knowledge for preventing, detecting and fighting crime.
These rules must have to be replaced by new ones to define application of the police order, or to provide for the transfer of lower staff from their districts of domicile.
But, interestingly, they said, the police order itself promoted local policing in vogue in many developed countries of the world. And it was yet to be seen as to how the government would oppose this very premise of the law.
According to the police rules of 1934, constables, head-constables, ASIs and SIs are recruited from the district of their domicile because of their supposed local knowledge of criminals, criminal tribes, terrain and nature of crime. Their service record is also maintained at the district level. Therefore, they cannot be transferred to other districts to follow the rules and their basic principle of establishing a local knowledge-based field staff.
Previously, the same rules were also applied on inspectors with the difference that they used to be recruited on the range basis. But since their initial grade has been upgraded from BS-11 to BS-16, they are now called supervisory staff and, therefore, can be posted anywhere in the province.
DSPs are the all Punjab officers, and they can be transferred anywhere in the province. But like all the gazetted or supervisory officers, they cannot be posted in the districts of their domicile.
The officers wondered as to how police were not framing rules of the Police Order 2002 to remove confusions being created regarding the final shape of the police department.
They revealed that the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB), which had framed the police order, had circulated its model rules to all provinces in 2003, but none of them had so far adopted them.
The NRB had asked the provinces to modify the model rules to suit their local requirements. The Punjab police had constituted a committee to do the needful, but the rules were sent to the cold storage only after a couple of meetings.
“You need rules to implement a law. The Pakistan Penal Code is being enforced through the Criminal Procedure Code. The Police Order 2002 has not such rules and, therefore, is not being fully implemented,” the officials remarked.