Cops struggle with challenges in their key fight against crime

INSUFFICIENT vehicles, work overload, a lack of manpower and corruption, are some of the challenges facing police officers in their fight against crime.

This is according to the recently released South African Police Service (SAPS) 2024/25 Annual Performance Plan.

The plan looked at the internal challenges faced by police officers, which included colleagues who were involved in crime; corruption; the low morale of members; increased workload; insufficient resources; reduced budget allocations; ageing and inadequate infrastructure; and the lack of professional empathetic employee, health and wellness services to members and their families.

The report also said the increasing population, had had several negative effects on the police, which already had a steadily declining staff complement.

“The organisation struggles to keep pace with the increasing demand for policing services, an increasing crime rate and the effects of an over-stretched policing capability.

“Government recognised that this tendency had to be reversed and allocated additional funding during 2022/23 to the extent of R8.7 billion, to extend and rejuvenate SAPS’ staff establishment through recruitment of 12 000 additional personnel members,” the report stated.

It added that as the population increased from an estimated 54 million in 2014 to 62 million in 2022, the actual workforce deployed at the front line to prevent, investigate and combat crime, uphold and enforce the law and protect and secure the people of the country and their property, declined from 152 977 in 2014/15 to 140 048 in 2021/22.

“The SAPS face the constant challenge or the need for the improved skilling and re-skilling of its workforce, in line with the policing demand and the need for greater specialisation in certain areas.

“Over the current medium-term strategic period, the human resource development focus of the organisation has been on the identified priority areas of crime prevention, including those capabilities that address GBV, the public order policing capability, crime intelligence and cybercrime,” the report read.

Police officers, who declined to be named, said they were struggling to do their work effectively.

“Currently, I am sitting with 100 dockets and I am expected to investigate each one to the best of my ability. These cases vary from serious crimes like murder to assault and robberies. How do I give each one my attention? An entire day can go with me just trying to track down leads for one case. There is not enough time,” said one officer.

The officer said the workload was “killing” them. “We close one case and there are several new ones waiting for us. We need additional manpower, urgently.”

Another officer said the lack of resources hampered investigations.

“There are times when we don’t have enough vehicles to go around in.

“They are either broken down or waiting to be repaired. How do we solve crime and how do we follow up on leads without having such resources? At one stage we were even sharing resources like computers.

“We have found that there are more people moving into suburbs and the number of police officers we have is not enough to service the area. We become overworked. It also becomes difficult to do your job when some members are involved in crime and corruption.”

Richard Mamabolo, the spokesperson for the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union, said a major challenge for police officers was that the staff component was declining as the population increased.

“At some police stations you will find there are only five officers working the night shift for a community of 30 000 people. There is a shortage of vehicles and at some stations you might only get two to three vehicles that are working. We too share computers.”

Mamabolo said these challenges had ruined relationships between communities and the police.

“Communities who call the police for assistance are not aware that there are no vehicles available; they just believe police don’t want to do their jobs.”

To address some of the issues, Brigadier Athlenda Mathe, the national police spokesperson, said they had finalised the recruitment and selection process for the first batch of 10 000 recruits for the 2024/2025 financial year.

“The first batch of 4 500 trainees reported for training at the various SAPS academies from Monday. A second batch of 5 500 recruits will commence with training in January 2025; this process is yet to be finalised.”

She said for the 2024/2025 recruitment, the SAPS received more than one million applications.

“Three years ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa called for enhanced police personnel capacity to combat crime. This prompted the SAPS to undertake a vigorous national recruitment and selection process known as Project 10 000.

“The SAPS have in the last two years trained and deployed 20 000 police officers to stations and units to bolster policing and efforts to prevent and combat crime.”