Punjab has launched a digital crime surveillance unit that gives senior police officials one-click access to up-to-date crime figures for every police station in the province, and lets them track the performance of individual officers.

Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif inaugurated the Chief Minister's Crime Surveillance Unit on Friday, 6 November 2026. The unit, set up inside the Punjab Police structure, is designed to monitor crime data and police performance across the province at district, circle and police-station level.

At the inauguration, the unit's head, Usman Tahir, briefed the chief minister on how the system works. Senior officials can now pull up the latest crime statistics for any station in the province at the click of a button, rather than waiting for reports to travel up through the hierarchy.

Twenty categories of crime tracked

The system covers 20 categories of crime, from murder and robbery to fraud and cybercrime. Data is entered by station house officers when a first information report is filed, and in-house experts produce analysis reports on demand. District police officers receive weekly trend analyses for their areas.

The surveillance unit also follows up citizens' complaints and applications, so senior officials can see whether cases are being resolved on time. The idea, according to reports of the launch, is that the data will show not just where crime is happening, but how quickly and effectively each station is responding to it.

The dashboard is already live for a pilot group of 50 police stations. The government plans to roll it out across the whole province within three months, bringing every station under the same monitoring system.

Reforms plan ordered

The chief minister also directed the Inspector General of Punjab Police to submit a comprehensive police reforms plan, and expressed displeasure over delays in the registration of first information reports. The surveillance unit is expected to make those delays harder to hide, since registration times will now be visible to senior officials in real time.

Punjab Police is the largest provincial police force in Pakistan, and its performance has long been a political issue. Successive governments have promised to improve policing, but citizens' complaints about delayed FIRs and slow investigations have persisted. The new unit is the latest attempt to use digital monitoring to hold the force accountable.

Whether the system changes anything on the ground will depend on how the data is used. A dashboard can show where crime is rising and which stations are slow to act, but it is the follow-up from senior officers that will decide whether the information leads to better policing or simply more reporting. The three-month rollout will be the first test of whether the province can bring its whole force onto the system.

For now, the launch marks a clear statement of intent from the Punjab government: police performance is to be measured, station by station, and the results will be visible at the top. (TechJuice, CW Pakistan)