Cognizant of the growing threat of radicalization taking place on social media, the Punjab Police is intending to have its own Face-book, Twitter and Youtube accounts in 2018 to interact directly with the citizens, give timely responses to queries, provide a complaint redressal mechanism, and showcase the positive work done by the police. These accounts are all set to be launched this month.
Giving details of the achievements of 2017 and plans for 2018, DGP Suresh Arora said peace, communal harmony and law & order were successfully maintained in 2017.He further said that a sharp decline in heinous crimes marked the year 2017 for the Punjab Police, which notched up major successes in maintaining law and order in the wake of the Dera Sacha Sauda chief’s conviction and arrest, besides busting as many as eight terror modules and solving the series of targeted killings that had rocked the state over the past two years.
Among the major highlights of the year was the busting of the terrorist module in Moga on November 8 and the arrest of five persons, which led to solving all the eight cases of targeted killing of activists/leaders of the organizations associated with the minority community, which had been pending over the past two years.
The Punjab Police has also made significant gains in implementing the Crime and Criminal Tracking System (CCTNS) by completing 24 Core Application Software Modules, integrating 08 Citizen Services being provided by Saanjh, providing hardware to all Police Stations, starting online registration of FIR and general diary, and digitization of last 10 years’ FIRs of all Police Stations in the state.
Upgradation of its counter-terrorism capacity is also high on its plans for 2018, as the police is all set to operationalize a crack force Special Operation Group (SOG), which would be trained and equipped to be at par with the best special forces in the world.
Also on the anvil during 2018 is implementation of the National Emergency Response System (NERS) Project, with the adoption of Centralized Call Taking and Distributed Dispatch, with a single Emergency Response No.112. The entire call taking would be at a Public Safety Answering Point (P-SAP) in Mohali with 60 work-stations, and 12 Police Control Rooms with 900 emergency vehicles, which is expected to be operational in April 2018.
Personnel management is another top priority for 2018, when nearly 4000 vacancies are expected to be filled up by direct recruitment, with focus on conducting recruitment every year to fill vacancies accruing through retirement and expansion.
Given the state’s sensitivity resulting from being located along the international border with Pakistan, a lot of effort was made during the year to strengthen the second line of defence to thwart cross-border terrorism by providing equipment and vehicles to the border districts, including BP morchas, thermal imagers, BP Tractors, body protectors, micro UAVs etc. Anti-riot capacity has also been strengthened, while acquisition of water cannons and armored carriers is under progress.
