Ulasi Police – Strengthening Rule of Law in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Period of Intervention: April 2016 to March 2017

Partner: USAID

Project Summary

Ulasi Police, a CRSS project aimed at strengthening rule of law in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – disseminating the significant police reforms, incorporating the local communities’ policing needs – made some significant progress during its course of implementation. The multi-pronged intervention – with the strategic communication tools of radio and TV, and electronic social and print media at the core – generated multiple results of addressing the public-police trust deficit, reducing gaps between the public’s demands and polices’ services on offer, and fostering public-police linkages and partnership for crime-free and just society.

To help ameliorate the public-police trust deficit, the endeavors aimed to propagate all those KP police reforms that have been taken (and even institutionalized while CRSS was publicizing them) over the last few years which were focused on benefiting the commoners and improve KP police’s public services on offer. This was mainly achieved through a radio advocacy campaign; series of syndicated radio programs across the districts of Peshawar, Mardan and Charsadda including 40 programs in each of these districts for the total of 121 radio shows. The radio shows were extremely inclusive in nature for several reasons. First for being participated by nearly 300 in-studio guests from different walks of life including police officials, community leaders, youth, women, lawyers, members of civil society, academia and intelligentsia etc. Second for 120 field based research reports/ radio reports produced to complement these radio shows. And third for a whopping 1,120 calls facilitated during the programs.

The television series was also an important strategic communication tool employed in this regard. This was an extremely significant intervention given the broadcast on Pakistan Television News (PTV). Airing TV shows through state broadcaster helped lending greater credibility to the discourse. The programs were participated by the senior most police officials in KP police who shared how the KP police was steadfastly reforming itself for improved accountability, transparency and operational autonomy. This included 10 TV shows on a variety of topics which are critical to the relation between public and police, with around 225 participants including audiences and speakers.

The print media was equally well utilized by the project to highlight the virtues of public-police partnership, address the trust deficit and also to mainstream the need for a community focused, accountable and friendly police force. This was achieved by publishing 25 Oped-Articles in the regional and national newspapers; written by prominent journalists. For the coverage of the consultations and public forums held as part of the project, 52 press-releases were also sent out for public notices, to the national and regional level newspapers; 26 each in Urdu and English which got covered by a whopping 150 newspapers and TV channels.

For dissemination through electronic social media, i) every single radio show was transcribed and uploaded on the CRSS social media accounts along with audio under the idea “Radio for Readers”. These radio shows reached out to 30,000 internet audiences online. ii) Same practice was adopted for TV shows which reached out to around 2,500 viewers online, iii) The cover stories for every single consultation, public forum, and opening and closing ceremonies were uploaded on CRSS website and social media. These 26 stories reached out to around 6,500 users online iii) Live-blogging; posting tweets of quotes from the live radio and TV shows has also been a standard operating procedure of the team. As a whole, this helped outreaching the online audience; thousands of users across the World Wide Web for extended impact.

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