Community essential to police work, says Minister

In his Police Budget Vote address in Parliament on Monday, Minister of Police Nkosinathi Nhleko, said that policing cannot exist without community support and participation, and that policing needs to continue to be subjected to public scrutiny to keep them accountable.

“The NDP [National Development Plan] envisions a state with the police working closely with the community,” Nhleko said.

The Minister said that one of his priorities was ensuring more community engagement and restoring public trust in the police and criminal justice system. He went on to say that the strategic priorities of the SAPS include reducing the number of serious and violent crimes, combating border and cyber crimes, increasing the percentage of trial-ready dockets for serious crimes, and stabilising public protests.

In order to achieve this, Minister Nhleko said that he would be re-introducing a review of the South African Police Act as well as a review of how Community Policing Forums [CPFs] can assist in stabilising service delivery protests.

As well as testing and training, the professionalisation of the police service includes improving community-based recruitment, because the community are well suited to “determining their suitability” for the job, he said.

Turning to civil unrest, the Minister said that a spate of community protests over the past few years have” stretched our capacity”. He added that of the 13 575 recent protests reported “and successfully stabilised”, 1907 turned violent and led to arrests. He said that SAPS needed to upgrade their public order policing facilities such as procuring new vehicles and video cameras and the like. He told MPs that refresher courses were now available in training police officers in crowd managing.

The Minister explained that he was clamping down on organised crime and drug trafficking and that of the 1218 suspects arrested by the Hawks for organised crime in the past financial year, 828 were convicted. Nhleko added that the police were also beefing up their forensic capability, including being one of the few countries that that tested DNA samples from suspects.

Police Portfolio Chair Francois Beukman from the ANC told MPs that over the past five years the levels of serious crime have been reduced and there has been an increase the number of citizens feeling safe when they walk alone at night.

With regards to the professionalism of officers, he said that as well as a duty to serve, adequate preparation, constant training and self-discipline; a Code of Ethical Practice should be developed. He emphasised the importance of community participation, the vital role played by Community Safety Forums and that “civilian input was essential” in the White paper on Policing and White Paper on Safety and Security in order to see improvements in SAPS.

Dianne Kohler Barnard, the DA’s Shadow Minister of Police, began her speech by saying that the new Minister “has inherited a shambles, with R150 million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure being just the tip of the iceberg that threatens to sink the whole ship.”

She seemed to question Nhleko’s suitability for the Minister of Police role by saying it appeared he dropped out of school in Grade 11, has no further education, and as the KZN Regional Commissioner of Correctional Services, he signed off on the medical parole for Zuma’s then financial advisor Schabir Shaik, “on dubious medical grounds”.

She tore into South Africa’s ousted National Police Commissioner, Jackie Selebi, who Kohler Barnard said, owed taxpayers R17 million that he should have started paying back after he lost his appeal but has failed to do so three years later. She reminded MPs that Selebi’s replacement, Bheki Cele, now Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, was found by the Public Protector to have acted improperly and unlawfully with his actions amounting to “maladministration".

Kohler Barnard levered her criticism at the state of SAPS more generally. She said that 153 stations were without toilets, running water and electricity, few working vehicles and that 1448 police officers were found to be convicted criminals. She added that there may be more “criminals in the ranks” but we would never know as the audit was “inexplicably stopped” at the end of 2010.

“SAPS members are so poorly trained that they wreck crime scenes, fail to collect evidence, destroy evidence or sell it,” Kohler Barnard said. However she added that there are thousands of SAPS officers “who have achieved extraordinary things, yet have never been promoted”, leaving them feeling disillusioned and demotivated. She also took the Minister to task for having “no plan to tackle police brutality”.

The DA’s Zakhele Mbhele spent most of his speech poking the Independent Police Investigative Directorate's [IPID] hornets nest, which he accused of failing to “spearhead accountability measures to strike at the heart of a culture of impunity for police misconduct and criminality”.

“The DA remains deeply concerned about vacancies in senior posts and past under spending in the institution as this impedes the IPID's ability to function optimally. In addition, concerns linger that the IPID's overall budget allocation is insufficient for it to fulfil its mandate once it reaches full operational capacity,” Mbhele said.

The EFF’s Lucky Twala then accused the police of working with SANRAL “to criminalise [the] community” with regards to unpaid toll fees in Gauteng.

Like Mbele, Twala also believes that IPID was faced with “inadequate resourcing” and that poor salaries led to a high staff turnover, yet the Minister had “no remedy” to prevent losing staff.

As well as being concerned with the level of corruption in SAPS, Twala added, “the quality of detective work which has always been a challenge and results in poor investigative outputs is leading to case dismissals in court”.

“We urge for the establishment of specialised units to deal with specific crimes resourced with [officers with] adequate skills in their areas of expertise, not only in high profile crimes… the best of the police are assigned to such cases. We would rather prefer specialised units that would serve all citizens that would facilitate equal treatment,” urged Twala.