Profiling of community residents on the cards
Police have started to work on a project to collect complete data of each household across the Rawalpindi district.
Under the community profiling project, police will go door-to-door to collect complete data of residents with pictures of all male residents.
A senior police officer told The Express Tribune that teams have been formed to collect door-to-door data of the residents. He said that it has been decided not to take pictures of women and children aged below 18.
The police officer said that Rawalpindi City Police Officer Syed Shahzad Nadeem Bukhari has approved the community profiling project after the success of the district enforcement unit.
“The objective of the community profiling project is to quickly trace and arrest elements involved in various crimes,” he said adding that with the help of the data, elements involved in street and other crimes could be arrested immediately.
“Most of the community profiling will be done by police stations. The profiling wing will collect complete details of households residing within the limits of each police station,” he said.
The police officer said that complete details of residents, tenants and foreigners in each locality will also be collected by giving each house the status of a unit. Women and children will not be photographed while collecting data, he said.
He said that a copy of the identity card of the head of the family will also be taken to verify the data from NADRA. The number of persons residing in each household will be noted according to gender, while help will also be taken from NADRA for further verification, he said.
He said that specific forms for collecting profile data will be provided to each household head who will be bound to provide correct information. The police officer said that the data collected through community profiling will be an extremely important fact after an incident occurs in an area.
He said that in many incidents, police have to face difficulty in tracing and identifying suspects. The police officer said that if the experiment of community profiling remains a success, police station house officers will be given access to the data.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 27th, 2022.