-Police Guarded Distribution Points organized for distribution of food/ration
-people urged to avoid direct food distribution and to avail new police service
-Police offers additional service to ensure public health safety, materialize Premier’s pledge
By Uzma Zafar
ISLAMABAD: In wake of the spread of Pandemic of COVID-19 and in light of Prime Minister’s zeal facilitating provision of food to needy, Inspector General Police of Islamabad has devised a special and unconventional policing service of organizing the food supply to the needy by the philanthropists and a special SOP has also been devised for the purpose.
Talking to The Daily Mail, Superintendent of Police Zubair Shaikh explained that there was a great mess in the offing in the process of provision of food and other charities to the needy by philanthropists in groups and individual capacities.
He said that IDP Islamabad had visualized that this could result into putting needy people in herds to receive the distributed food etc and will eradicate all efforts of the government to ensure social distancing to prevent virus spread. SP Zubair said that to tackle this issue.
IGP tasked his field operators to formulate foolproof methodology to ensure both the provision of food and public health safety. " Under these instruction we came up with the idea of managing the distribution food, ration or whatever someone wants to distribute, under a disciplined manner so that social distancing could also be ensured. We also ran an extra mile and also came up with identifying the genuine needy ones in the jurisdictions of every Police Stations as none other than the local police personnel could identify the genuine and non-genuine needy in the respective areas.
Now this service is just being offered as a choice to the people who want to donate or distribute and not as a compulsion how ever we are very strict about discouraging the direct food/ration distribution. It has never been a police job to organize such distribution points as according to world reports, Pakistanis top the world in donating for charity and it had got nothing to do with prescribed police business.
However under the current circumstance, it was highly imperative for police to come up with some novel ideas to ensure public health safety that had come under acute threat," asserted SP Zubair Shaikh, adding that ignoring this police facility would not only jeopardize the health of the general public but would add to the problems of the State and could also result into a chaos at any stage.
Many cities of Pakistan are witnessing the distribution of food/ration and even cash by philanthropists to the jobless individuals and families who have gone breadless after the soft lockdown across country to suppress virus spread. many visuals have come on media and social media depicting people not only getting into extreme health hazards but also destroying the distributed items/food in bids to snatch the same in the most indiscipline manner. With BBC reporting that 98 percent of the Pakistani nation make donations regularly, the charity distribution under current situation was bound to be phenomenal and needed some organized structure.
However, Capital Police Chief has come forward as the first top cop of the country to take it as a police responsibility to organize the guarded and disciplined distribution points for ensuring both the social distancing and provision of needed supplies.
There have been some isolated incidents in the Capital territory where people ignored this unique police service and it did result into chaos and police had to intervene in the ultimate way to ensure public health safety and to ensure writ of the government. The Daily Mail also urge the people to avail this service by Capital Police to ensure both Help and public health safety
