LAHORE:Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz on Tuesday ordered a crackdown on corrupt elements within the police force, directing the Inspector General of Police to identify and weed out corrupt officials within one week, according to an official statement issued after a special meeting on law and order.
Presiding over the meeting, the chief minister said maintaining peace and protecting the lives and property of citizens remained the government’s top priority.
The session produced a series of directives spanning internal accountability, frontline policing technology, custodial security and crimes against women and children — a package that reaches into some of the most persistent structural complaints against policing in the province.
The one-week deadline handed to the IGP is the sharpest of Tuesday’s orders, converting a broad reform ambition into a dated deliverable with a named owner.
Alongside it, the chief minister ordered that police officers known for corruption should not be appointed as station house officers, and called for strict action against corrupt officials.
The SHO restriction carries particular weight. The station house officer is the pivot of routine policing in Pakistan — controlling FIR registration, investigation priorities and the day-to-day interface between citizen and state. Barring officers with a corruption record from that post targets the precise rung where public trust is most often won or lost.
The chief minister set September 30 as the deadline for equipping Punjab Police personnel with body cameras, the statement said.
She also approved the installation of GPS devices and cameras in prisoner vans, and directed the authorities to take strict action over incidents involving the escape of prisoners.
Both measures address accountability gaps that have historically been difficult to adjudicate. Body-worn cameras create a contemporaneous record of stops, searches and arrests, shifting complaint resolution away from competing testimony. GPS tracking and in-vehicle cameras in prisoner transport respond directly to custodial escapes — incidents that are frequently contested and rarely documented.
In a structural change to the province’s policing architecture, the meeting decided to bring the operational control of Dolphin Police under the jurisdiction of the respective police stations.
The Dolphin Force, a motorcycle-mounted rapid-response unit, has operated with a degree of autonomy since its creation. Folding it into station-level command consolidates accountability under the local SHO structure and is likely to change how patrol deployment and response coordination are managed at district level.
The chief minister sought a comprehensive plan to ensure effective control of crimes against women and children, and ordered a zero-tolerance policy against those involved in such offences.
“Children and women are my red line. No one will be spared for crimes against them,” she said, adding that the government would fulfil its responsibility of protecting the lives and property of citizens.
The IGP briefed the meeting that the overall crime situation in the province had improved, with robberies declining by 54 per cent, murders by 35pc, car snatching by 46pc and motorcycle theft by 53pc.
In Lahore, the briefing reported murders down 43pc, robberies down 32pc, car snatching down 43pc and motorcycle theft down 54pc.
The chief minister nonetheless directed the police to intensify efforts to curb burglary and ordered a clean-up operation in Sheikhupura to eliminate crime — an indication that the province-wide averages mask districts where performance has lagged.
Closing that gap, the chief minister said district police officers would be held accountable in districts where crime rates remained high.
That directive, read alongside the Sheikhupura operation, signals a shift from aggregate reporting toward district-level performance measurement — placing individual DPOs, rather than the force as a whole, on the hook for local outcomes.
Three dates now anchor the reform agenda: the one-week window for the IGP’s list of corrupt officials, the September 30 body-camera deadline, and the still-unspecified timeline for the comprehensive plan on crimes against women and children.
Whether the crime declines reported on Tuesday hold — and whether the accountability measures survive contact with the district-level command structure they are meant to discipline — will determine how much of this week’s meeting is remembered as reform rather than announcement.
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