SAPS roasted over failure to police child justice law

THE police have been given a roasting in parliament for failing to properly implement a critical law aimed at keeping young offenders out of jail.

Police top brass were sent packing by the portfolio committee on police yesterday when they failed to provide it with critical information on how they are enforcing the Child Justice Act two years after it was enacted.

Briefing the portfolio yesterday head of crime prevention in the visible policing division, Major General Susan Pienaar was at pains to explain how the act, which came into effect in April 2010, had kept child offenders out of jail and in diversion programmes.

“There is a lot of information that we need to really monitor whether we are dealing with this act correctly. It is information that we need in our system that is currently not being captured. The system doesn’t allow us to do that,” she said.

Pienaar failed to provide the exact number of young offenders who had been channelled into diversion programmes, youth care facilities or who were arrested and jailed.

MPs were visibly annoyed at the lack of information on how the act had been implemented, how it had been budgeted for and how police had been trained to comply with the provisions of the legislation.

“The issues of the systems were highlighted in the first report and now you’re telling us you’re still working on it. What planning was done before this legislation was implemented?” acting committee chairman and ANC MP Annelize van Wyk asked.

“We know exactly what the act says and what must be done. We ask: how did you budget for it? Where is it reflected in your budget? How can you prove as SAPS, because no one in SAPS has proved to us yet that this is a priority that you planned for,” she said.

DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard said: “We’re asking, pleading for information on whether or not it’s being done. We’re on the ground we see it’s not being done.”

However, Pienaar said the police had never done a costing on what needed to be allocated for the implementation of the act as the national overall police budget was “adequate”.

“How do you hope to improve considering you don’t know the budget?” COPE MP Mluleki George asked.

According to a joint report presented by the police and the department of justice, 32 000 police officers out of a total of 165 000 had been trained to enforce the legislation.

But the police could not break down the ranks of those that had already been trained while the quality and discrepancies in the training were also criticised.

This, after it emerged that some of the identified officers had only received five days’ training, others three days’ and some had only received a briefing that lasted half a day.

‘ We know exactly what the act says . . . we see it's not being done