The absence of professional autonomy, poor training, lack of access to basic data and inadequate tools to investigate in the Police Department are the main causes of undermining the police investigations resulting in meagre 5 to 10 percent conviction rate in the country, say the police and research experts.
They said that Pakistan has numerous laws regarding protection of citizens, but the mechanism entailing implementation of these laws is very poor, ineffective and dysfunctional. This is one reason why people of Pakistan are subjected to violations of basic human rights.
This they said while delivering the lectures on the topic titled "investigation techniques used for probing criminal cases" at Area Study Centre, University of Sindh Jamshoro here on Tuesday. Dean Faculty of Social Sciences Professor Dr Parvaiz Ahmed Pathan presided over the program while Director of the Centre Professor Dr Hamadullah Kakepoto, Dr Ghulam Ali Jareko, Dr Nasreen Memon, Dr Ghulam Sarwar Gachal, Dr Ahmed Ali Brohi and others were also present besides a large number of teachers and scholars.
Dr Sanaullah Abbasi said when a crime is committed, the police must determine who committed it so that the criminal can be prosecuted and brought to justice. But how the police go about investigating these crimes, it is an important issue. He said the total police strength in Pakistan was 324,933 and in Sindh were only 70,133 while the population of the province was about five billion. "We have only 18,900 police personnel in Hyderabad range which is not enough to curb crime fully," he said.
Speaking on fair trial in police department, the DIG Hyd said that the persons could tell a lie but circumstances and technology couldn't; however, technology he said was handled by persons and the circumstances could be moulded by persons. He further said that the authenticity of FIR must be assessed not only to establish its relevance and reliability as firsthand information about the offence, but in view of removal of any invented or fabricated facts to safeguard interests of the complainant. Measures seeking to prevent blatant false accusations in the process of an FIR must be controlled with robust techniques aimed at transforming the process of investigation to the benefit every citizen. One of the ways to achieve desired results in the area would be to make S.182 PPC, a part of the process of Investigation which starts from registration of an FIR. Separate investigation branches must be made for police stations instead of concentrating in the SHO, the powers to handle the FIR.
Talking about the procedure of filing FIR, Dean Faculty of Social Sciences said: it is already prescribed in Section 154 CrPC 1898. On the occasion, Director of the Area Study Centre Professor Dr Hamadullah Kakepoto said that this was primarily due to the offence committed under the Section being bailable and the nature of punishment related to the section. It can be proposed that the punishment under Section 182 must compensate the victim to the extent that he is brought back to the same situation he was in if the wrong information had not been provided to the public official. Additionally, the punishment under Section 182 may be made equal to that of the offence reported under it which causes public servant to use his authority to the injury of the other. Later, the book titled Pakistan-Japan political & economic relations written by Dr Khalil Ur Rehman Shaikh was launched in the Chinese Corner.