Detective Services needs urgent attention to win the fight against crime - DA

18 September 2008

DIANNE KOHLER BARNARD, MP
DA SPOKESPERSON ON SAFETY & SECURITY

In the DA's vision of an Open Opportunity Society for All, ensuring personal safety is non-negotiable, yet in South Africa today the government's inability to properly manage the scourge of crime means that too many South Africans are trapped in a web of terror caused by crime.

However, the DA firmly believes that crime in South Africa does not have to be an inescapable reality - significant reductions in the crime rate are possible, if a number of critical steps are taken to turn the criminal justice system around.

One of the most important of these steps is to ensure that we have an effective, well-resourced and properly staffed detective service. The detective component of the South African Police Service (SAPS) is vital to our ability to solve crimes and detect criminals. The certainty that you will be caught, arrested and convicted is a key component in deterring crime.

No criminal can be convicted unless good detective work ensures that a water-tight case is constructed. Yet, the entire criminal justice process is currently being short-circuited by poor detective work. The SAPS currently refers a dismal 31.9% of all reported crime to the courts. This means that 68% of all reported crimes do not even make it to court and the majority of criminals are simply allowed to get away with their actions.

Given the essential importance of the SAPS's investigative capacity in the fight against crime, the Detective Services should have received the lion's share of SAPS funding and personnel allocations over the years. Instead, from 1994 until now, the primary focus of the SAPS has been ‘crime prevention' through Visible Policing. While no doubt important, visible policing simply does not have the same dampening effect on criminal activity that a high arrest and conviction rate has.

As a direct result of the ‘neglect' of the Detective Services, the SAPS's investigative capacity has been crippled and this in turn has contributed greatly to South Africa's intolerably high levels of crime - especially violent crime.

The effect of this neglect is glaringly illustrated by the following statistics:

• Calculations based on statistics provided by the SAPS, the Department of Justice and the Presidency indicate that only six out of every 100 crimes committed result in a conviction;


• The number of new cases bought before the courts has dropped by 22% over the past five years - not because of drastic reductions in the crime rate, but because of a increasing inability to identify and arrest criminals;


• More than 300 000 cases are withdrawn or scrapped from the court rolls every year, in many instances as a result of poor or inadequate detective work;


• Only 15% of SAPS members are dedicated to solving crimes;


• Half of the on average  2 million crime scenes reported every year are never visited, due to a lack of experts to collect evidence;


• The SAPS 1691 crime scene experts have to visit three crime scenes a day and, on average two experts share one car, five share one cell phone and three share a computer.


• There are only 923 forensic experts in SAPS laboratories

The dire state of the detective services is also reflected by research conducted by the DA over the last year. Visits by DA MPs to selected police stations throughout the country have revealed the following:

• Most detectives manage a case load of 40 or more cases. The ideal case load is ten cases at any one time;


• Most stations have low detection rates of  20-40% (ability to identify the suspect/s and present case to the public prosecutor);


• Half of the stations have a rape conviction rate of less than 20%;


• More than half of the stations had a murder conviction rate of less than 20%; and


• The majority of detectives have not completed specialised detective training.

It is clear that in order to improve the functioning of the criminal justice system, the ability of the SAPS to detect and solve crime must be dramatically improved. In our crime policy, Conquering Fear, Commanding Hope launched earlier this year, a number of solutions were proposed to achieve this goal, and these include the following:

• A policy shift from the prioritising of visible policing to an equal focus on the detective services;


• Detective services being allocated a budget on a par with that of visible policing, and no less than R15 billion a year,


• The recruitment of an additional 30 000 detectives;


• The accelerated provision of equipment and resources;


• Allowing lateral entry from the private sector into the detective services;


• An improvement in the working conditions and salaries;


• The creation of a real time, central, electronic crime statistics database

If the above measures are speedily and effectively implemented then there is every chance that the success rate in the fight against crime can be dramatically improved.