PESHAWAR: US State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs’ Country Director Lori J. Antolinez on Wednesday said her organisation had been funding professionalising civil security forces and the civil security sector at the federal and provincial level.
Talking to a group of journalists through a virtual meeting, she said INL had been working for over four decades for professionalizing the police force, countering threat, transnational crime, counter narcotics activities, anti-money laundering, countering cybercrime and transnational or international criminal organizations.
“We have put a billion dollars of assistance into these types of programmes that strengthen law enforcement capacity and the justice sector. Of that one billion dollars over half has been spent in KP and Balochistan at some point,” she added.
The INL country director said that training the police was an area where they wanted to improve the effectiveness of the training and determining whether or not the people that got trained end up applying that knowledge to influence decisions or to respond differently in their jobs.
She said INL focused to help them transform their training into scenario-based and tactical rather than theoretical classroom training so that they were better prepared to handle different situations in the field and also maintain good rapport with citizens and respect human rights.
To a question about the KP chief investigator’s statement that they needed 500 trained investigators and evidence collectors, she said, “those 556 people that were trained we would have to go back and look at that and it would be a great conversation for us to have with that leadership who is saying they need continued training to find out what happened with those that have already trained.”
She said there was a need for updating the training especially with investigations because the tactics that criminals used were constantly changing.She added that new methods and new technology were being used to commit crime, therefore, the force required additional training.
She said the implementation of a case management system to automate the judicial system would help look at the bottlenecks and a visitor management system in some of the prisons to regulate the prison record.
To a question about the capabilities of militants carrying out cross border attacks, she said, “that’s a constant challenge and that is why we are trying to provide the surveillance capacity drones that would allow a greater range of those non-lethal only surveillance type drones to provide a greater range of site as well as the night vision goggles. We’re all trying to deliver on that as quickly as possible.”
She said that Frontier Corps, FIA, Customs officials and ANF said that they needed better facilities and technology.They may need assistance in terms of sharing information on the same types of platforms, she said, adding that’s not only within the Pakistani interagency but also opening the doors to sharing information with international partners through Interpol or through the United States or other partners that are willing to be checking the biodata of people who are going across the borders.
“It’s like we never have enough resources and on top of that you have to be able to work really well with your neighboring authorities.”“Our assistance can help, we can share again, a best practice that we have on the Mexican border, like sharing of information right there at the border but it is not easy for political reasons.”
She thought managing the border was difficult and that’s why they wanted to justify additional resources to help “so that the flow of people and goods is controlled and facilitated while keeping the contraband and criminals out.”
The INL country director said they had various mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation. “We do collect a lot of data from the partners, but we’re also independently collecting information.”
The International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs’ official said that the visitor management system and case management system was “one way that we’re able to set indicators from the beginning doing assessment so we know where we’re starting from and then go back and look at the progress that’s been made after using the tool.”
“We have project specific indicators that we established at the beginning of a project and then we have programme figure indicators. We do hire some implementers for monitoring a couple of projects as American diplomats we are not allowed to go to for security reasons,” she added.
