Police Response to COVID 19: Policy Implementation Practices and Challenges during First Phase of COVID-19 in Peshawar Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Abstract
The eruption of Corona virus was first observed in the city of Wuhan, China on 31st December 2019. The official name of corona virus was announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) as COVID-19 on February 11, 2020. The epicenter of the disease kept on shifting from China to all over the world. Countries including Pakistan have formulated different strategies to mitigate COVID-19. Lockdown and social distancing are adopted as a containment strategy for the pandemic by plenty of countries around the globe in order to mitigate the virus. The spread of COVID-19 has created social upheaval and distorted standards for all members of society, but its effects on first responders have been specifically reflective specifically the police department and the healthcare. The Police department had to remove local barriers in their daily work, encourage social distancing, and perform full-time jobs for which they were unprepared. Time to time the guidelines changed hence, the police department had faced challenges in implementation of the guidelines provided by the government especially during the lockdown. The aim of this research study is to evaluate the policies and guidelines for the police department. Further to examine the implementation strategies and identify the challenges faced by the police department during the COVID-19. This research study has used a qualitative approach by interviewing 35 police personals who had performed duty during the COVID-19 period. Thematic analysis has done through matrices method which provided the researcher to explore different themes in depth. The area for the data collection is selected Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) as majority of the COVID-19 cases were reported from there. The main finding of this research thesis shows that that the police department had faced human and financial resource shortage due to which their health being affected. They were not guided properly and were in vague while implementing the policies. Majority of the police personals were in fear of performing the duty as they were not provided enough resources. The duty hours were increased beyond their capacity hence their duty performance had decreased.
