The civil society activists will visit the police stations of Peshawar to assess the quality of service being offered there. This was announced during a meeting of activists of civil societies held here at the office of Aurat Foundation on Thursday.
The participants of the meeting constituted three teams to undertake visits to as many police stations of Peshawar, including Khan Raziq (Kabuli) Police Station, Town Police Station and Hayatabad Police Station from October 22 to 28th. Earlier, Team Leader and Program Officer of the Aurat Foundation, Tariq briefed the participants regarding the aims and objectives of the activity.
The co-ordinator for the activity told the gathering that Altus was a global alliance that was working across the continents and a multicultural perspective to improve the public safety and justice.
The activity co-ordinator said the 'Police Stations Visitors Week' was a unique world-wide event that was organised by Altus in collaboration with partners with the aim to strengthen community-policing partnership.
Tariq said the partners of Altus in Pakistan were Rozan, Aurat Foundation, Cholistan Development Council and Shehri-CBE. He said the visits were meant for assessing the quality of service delivered by police departments; identify some of the best practices in use by police, and strengthen the accountability of police to the local citizens whom they serve.
He informed the meeting that keeping the past practice intact, this year, too, the visiting teams would consist of members from the civil society, women's organisations, resident welfare societies, students and journalists.
He reminded the audience that police stations of 23 countries were visited in 2006 as per the activity, while this year the number of countries would stand at 40.
Explaining the process, the team leader said during the week, the visitors would fill out individual questionnaires; discuss perceptions on the five categories mentioned in the forms and then feed the observations into the questionnaires.
These individually filled out questionnaires would be later handed to the team leader who would then upload the scores for each visitor, but under the team code. Altus would finally prepare a national report for all countries where at least 10 police stations have been visited.
Tariq told the participants that Altus had divided the globe into five regions, adding Pakistan had been placed in the South East/South Asian region. He said other participating countries for this region were India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, South Korea and Turkey.