No time for office hours, SHOs insist

‘Officers failing to comply with orders will be suspended’.

LAHORE:

Most station house officers (SHOs) in the city police are not observing office hours despite the directive issued by the deputy inspector general (operations) in this regard, The Express Tribune has learnt.

A meeting was held on Monday between the SHOs of all police stations in the city and the senior superintendent of police where the former were threatened with suspension if they continued to ignore office hours. SSP (Operations) Shaukat Abbas said the SHOs were told that they had to comply with the orders.

He said those found ignoring the directive would be suspended and disciplinary action recommended against them.

DIG (Operations) Ghulam Muhammad Dogar had directed the SHOs two weeks ago to be available at the stations between 3 pm and 6 pm.

Several SHOs speaking on conditions of anonymity said they were too burdened with other duties to observe office hours every day.

An SHO said that besides the protocol and security duties, daily visits to courts and meetings with superintendents of police did not leave them with enough time to ensure their presence in office during the required hours.

He said if it was extremely necessary for the SHOs to observe office hours, a code of conduct should be prepared and a schedule figured out to ensure that their other assignments don’t clash with the requirement.

Another SHO the Tribune talked to said he came to work at 10am in the morning and at times he stayed at work until midnight. He said many of his colleagues complained about excessive workload. He objected to the logic of holding office hours and said that in many cases the SHOs were not even empowered to register FIRs. “An SHO was recently forced to resign because he had registered an FIR under Section 506 of the Pakistan Penal Code without informing the SP concerned,” he said.

SP (Model Town) Awais Ahmad admitted that routine duties and visits to courts and field were necessary but added that these could not be an excuse for not observing office hours. He said a work plan would be devised in the coming days to ensure that routine duties of the SHOs do not clash with the office hours so that the SHOs could remain present at the police stations in the required hours.



Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2011.