“WE must urgently ask ourselves as a people and a country, is South Africa’s police service failing in the fight against crime?”
This was the first probing question posed by Zizamele Cebekhulu-Makhaza, the president of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) during his opening remarks at the 2023 Policing Indaba. The indaba was held at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg, Ekurhuleni on Wednesday, 23 August.
The Policing Indaba is a new Popcru initiative aimed at bringing different partners from the criminal justice cluster as well as the public and private sectors together to find solutions to crime and policing challenges.
After highlighting some of the grim crime statistics released by Police Minister Bheki Cele on Friday, 18 August, as the motivation for the indaba, Cebekhulu-Makhaza noted that while there were slight improvements, levels of violent crime remained “alarmingly high”.
He said 6 228 people were violently murdered between April and June 2023, equating to an average of 68 murders per day.
Cebekhulu-Makhaza said sexual offences against women remained alarmingly high at 11 616 cases or an average of five cases and another 149 806 contact crimes such as attempted murder and assault were committed, translating to one contact crime committed every 51 seconds.
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He said: “The latest quarterly crime statistics released by the Honourable Minister Bheki Cele paint a bloody picture of violence tearing away at our social fabric while our citizens tremble in fear in their own homes.
“The state must therefore consider that if the South African Police Service (SAPS) is failing to enforce the rule of law, then the state itself is failing, and South Africa is on the way towards becoming a failed state.”
He said the country’s law enforcement requires greater resources and “budgetary muscle”.
“It is pointless to keep feeding a bull in the hope of getting milk. Resources must be reallocated to where they will do the most good.
“The model that the SAPS is currently utilising is an old, top-heavy apartheid model that forms tall organisational structures that consume a lot of human capital," said Cebekhulu-Makhaza.
"When police officers are promoted to constables or captains, they become supervisors and move away from active crime-fighting duties to offices instead.
“But police officers must not be left to sit in offices. We must put police officers to work and increase police visibility.
"Assigning senior police officers to a desk to perform administrative tasks that could be performed by civilians is compromising our mission to maintain law and order. We must reassign trained officers to active crime-fighting duties.”
