Digital Policing and the Urban–Rural Divide: Citizen-Centric Police Services in District Jhang, Punjab

Abstract

This paper discusses six police apps under the jurisdiction of Punjab Police, Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA), and Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB): Women Safety Application, PSCA Public Safety Application (including Virtual Women Police Station and Virtual Centre for Child Safety), Rasta traffic app, Digital Warden challan system, Anti-Vehicle Lifting System (AVLS), and e-Gadget stolen-mobile monitoring system used in District Jhang. Unlike back-end identification tools operated exclusively by police personnel, these applications are designed for direct citizen use or citizen-facing enforcement encounters, positioning residents, traffic wardens, and mobile-phone merchants as active participants in emergency response, traffic compliance, and property-crime recovery. Using a qualitative case-study design combining document analysis, comparative provincial and Lahore-specific statistics, and interviews with district officials, the article finds that citizen-facing applications with strong institutional recovery mechanisms notably AVLS, which achieves a forty-four percent vehicle recovery rate in Jhang against a twenty percent provincial and 22.8 percent Lahore average perform comparatively well even in a semi-rural district, whereas applications dependent on individual citizen or merchant adoption and connectivity, such as the PSCA Public Safety App's advanced features, the Women Safety App, and e-Gadget's merchant network (forty-five registered shops in Jhang against 1,800 in Lahore), show substantial urban-rural performance gaps. The article argues that this divergence reflects a broader digital-divide dynamic in which institutionally mediated applications outperform citizen- or merchant-adoption-dependent ones in infrastructurally constrained districts, with direct implications for how digital policing investment should be sequenced in Pakistan's secondary districts.

Keywords: Digital Divide, Citizen-Facing E-Governance, Emergency Response, Traffic Policing, Property-Crime Recovery, Co-Production, District Jhang.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22016438