Cops’ exams reveal poor investigative skills

Only 14 candidates out of total of 14,700 could score above 80%

LAHORE:

The investigations capacity of Punjab Police officers is quite compromised, a departmental examination has revealed.

The majority of the candidates ie over 78% of them could not score even 60% of the marks in the departmental examination.

Ironically, only 14 of 14,700 candidates could score above 80%. The top brass of the Punjab Police for the past few years had been focusing on improvement of the investigations wing owing.

During the last decade, most of the focus had been building the capacity of the operations wing-like infrastructure development, patrolling vehicles, specialised patrolling force, 15 emergency call systems, Anti-Riot Force, Computerised Central Ops Rooms and dozens of the IT-based apps.

Recently, they had focused to start interventions in capacity building of the investigations wing.

For this purpose, the top brass opted to move ahead based on “Training Needs Analysis”.

Under the procedure, the gaps, strengths and needs are identified first to introduce the interventions.

The recent examinations were meant for this purpose.

The top brass had not been expecting such astonishing results.

The officers had proposed that they would allocate the high sensitivity nature cases for the investigations to the officers who would score above 80%. However, only 14 of them throughout Punjab could cross the bar. The passing benchmark had been set 60%.

As a shock to the commanders, only 3,500 of them could surpass the limit.

On the other hand, the investigations officers- belonging to the rankers (non-PSP) on social media have raised a hue and cry about setting up the out of course (for some more difficult than CSS examination papers) papers for them.

Some also lashed out for the derogatory treatment of them during the conduct of the examination.

An ex-policeman shared a picture of the investigations officers sitting on the ground in open under the hot sun at Qila Gujjar Singh police lines.

An officer said that keeping in view the situation starting from March 21, a one-month course will be taught to the officers before the conduct of the examinations once again.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2022.