Under fire from the Opposition and also accused of being politicised, the Punjab police on Thursday claimed to have controlled crime and maintained peace in the State during 2017 with the busting of eight terror modules, solving of targeted killings and drugs cases.
looking ahead at the 2018, the state police chief Suresh Arora on Thursday shared that the police would upgrade its counter-terrorism capacity by operationalizing Special Operation Group (SOG), besides setting up a single emergency response number 112.
“We would soon 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,” he said.
Another thing we are going to do in 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, he said.
“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,” he added.
Keeping pace with the growing technology and increasing “misuse” of social media, the Director General of Police (DGP) said Punjab Police would be launching its own Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts in January 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.
“This year, we would be recruiting 4000 people in the force. The government has decided that 2000 every year can be recruited in the force to fill vacancies accruing through retirement and expansion, and thus 2000 each of the previous and current year would be recruited in 2018,” he said.
Arora said that the police personnel are also being trained in showing required gender-sensitivity in interacting with women, particularly the victims of crime. “There would be effective and prompt response on complaints of sexual assault or harassment, domestic violence, eve teasing and obscene calls or texts,” he said. Maintaining that the Police would continue its focus on women, Arora said that Zonal Women Conference would be held starting from January 4, at Patiala, to evolve a dedicated action plan which would be unveiled on March 8 at a state level function.