SAPS to introduce strategy to probe cold cases

THREE years after Taegrin Morris was dragged to his death in a hijacking, his killers are still free.

The four-year-old was left dangling outside his mother’s car after three armed men pushed his mother and his eight-year-old sister out of the vehicle and sped off from his grandmother’s home in Reiger Park.

Sergeant Mashudu Phathela, the spokesperson for Reiger Park’s police station, says detec- tives are still pursuing leads and appealed to the public to come forward with any information about the murder.

The child’s case has joined other unclosed dockets across South Africa that have gone cold. There are other high-profile cold cases. Just last week Police Minister Fikile Mbalula announced that detectives would be added to the team that is investigating the Senzo Meyiwa case.

Now the SAPS plans to tackle those unsolved cases through the establishment of a Cold Case Strategy.

This strategy, according to Vuyo Mhaga, spokesperson for the police ministry, is part of the SAPS Turn Around Vision 2018, which was introduced by national police commissioner Lieutenant- General Khehla Sitole.

“We started to canvas on it some time last year. At the time it was linked to gender-based violence, but now we want to expand it to all cases,” Mhaga says.

Gareth Newham, head of the governance, crime and justice division at the Institute for Security Studies, believes it is the first time that the SAPS has considered introducing such a strategy.

“The detection rate for murder in South Africa is just over 20%, which means that in one in every five cases detectives are able to solve a murder case. So, there are thousands and thousands of unsolved murder cases. Obviously, a cold case unit can’t investigate all these cases, so you need to have some sort of criteria to investigate a particular case.”