SAPS in dark over success rate
Police’s number counters in a daze over seven-year serious crime stats
Police can’t account for the more than 120 000 murders and 241 000 rapes that were reported in the past seven years.
According to the South African Police Service’s own stats,120 358 murders and 241568 rapes took place over the past seven years.
However, the men and women in blue seem not be tracking these cases in terms of the number of arrests made and how many led to successful convictions or ended in cold cases.
Despite being given two weeks to collate the data, national police spokesperson Colonel Athlenda Mathe said despite her best efforts, the department could not reconcile the reported cases, arrests and convictions.
At its national executive committee lekgotla in January the ANC identified crime as one of the biggest challenges in South Africa. “There must be deliberate efforts to increase the capacity of the SAPS. This will address an ageing police service as well as the worsening police-to-population ratio of 1:400 against the norm of 1:220,” the party said.
National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) spokesperson Bulelwa Makeke said the authority did not keep records of suspects “identified” or persons “arrested” for any offences and that it was the police who were able to provide this breakdown.
“The NPA measures cases [including the number of counts] of murder and sexual offences cases, which does assist in comparing SAPS data with the data from the prosecution.”
However, she said several factors made the proper comparison of the manually collected data difficult. These include:
• One docket often results in multiple court cases, especially when the accused enter different pleas or were arrested months or even years apart.
• Several case dockets may also be combined in one court case, especially where the same offences were committed over a period of time – these often include murder and robbery suspects that have multiple offences committed over a period of time before being arrested.
• Dockets opened in one year were often only brought to court a year or more later and might take months or years to be finalised, depending on the number of accused and other factors.
• The NPA did not record “rape” separately and the best information available related to the counts involving sexual offences.
Ian Cameron , spokesperson for Action Society, said detectives were not coping with many dockets. “Action Society is disappointed at [Police Minister Bheki] Cele’s constant failure to bring the Convicted Offenders Bill to parliament. A shocking 10 000 rape cases were reported between April and June 2021, with the successful conviction rate staying at a miniscule 3%. These numbers are evidence that South Africa’s rape stats are equal to a country at war. So much has gone wrong within the SAPS in recent years and it has experienced major decay under the leadership of Cele,” he said.
The SAPS has experienced major decay under Cele’s leadership