In a previous budget debate, I made the statement that policing is about people. This year I wish to make a statement on what policing is NOT about: policing is not, in the main, about the mere fact of budget and resources, despite our purpose today being a budget vote. Rather, policing and any hope of improving its performance to reduce crime, is about the management of budget and resources.
The South African Police Service (SAPS) budget increased by 50% since 2012 to R87-billion in 2017. Between 2002 and 2012, the organisation grew by about 68 000 posts. Despite these increases, the murder rate increased by 13% since 2012 and the number of armed robberies
reported to the police has risen by 31%.
The problem isn’t a lack of resources – the problem, to quote the Institute for Security Studies, “is incompetence and dishonesty at the highest levels of policing which have profoundly weakened the ability of the country’s crime-fighting institutions to tackle corruption and violent and organised crime”.
Under different circumstances, the DA would have lamented the budget baseline reductions and resultant post establishment cuts over the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) period. But given past experience, we know that more money has not seen things get better, so perhaps
fiscal austerity, in exacerbating and making stark the state of crisis that the police service is in, might force key reforms to be made that improve its management and ultimately performance.
So what are the key reforms that are required to ensure an effective and efficient police service that actually reduces crime to foster safe streets and safe homes? The DA believes that three key pillars of police reform are required, which we would implement when a DA-led national
government is elected.
The first pillar is one already championed by the National Development Plan (NDP), namely that of professionalisation. Like the medical field and education, policing should be treated as a profession and indeed a vocation of public service, not just another job or simple occupation. In many jurisdictions around the world, one needs to attain a professional qualification before beginning active service in the police and this was one of the key lessons from the Portfolio Committee’s study trip to the People’s Republic of China in October last year.
In practice, the entrenchment of a culture of professional service in the police is the same as the foundation of any good organisational culture: merit-based appointment and promotion, proportionate rewards for excellence and innovation, and strong accountability enforcement for underperformance and misconduct. Essential for the former, will be the establishment of the NDP-proposed National Policing Board and, crucial for the latter, will be the adequate resourcing and independence of accountability mechanisms, primarily the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID).
The second pillar is localisation. A DA-led national government would localise budget and management authority away from national and provincial levels to cluster and station levels in order to empower police closer to the ground to devise and implement policing strategies that are responsive to their local contexts and crime trends. In addition, this would enable them to convene local safety partnerships that leverage the resources of other safety stakeholders for force multiplier effects.
Centralisation has been shown repeatedly not to work and a case in point is the shambles that is the SAPS Garages. Why should a station not be able to undertake simple repairs and replacements itself, within appropriate financial controls, so that getting new brake pads can be done in 3 days tops, as opposed to the currently more common 3 weeks or even 3 months?
Finally, the third pillar isspecialisation. The SAPS to date has had a schizophrenic approach to this: on one hand, re-establishing specialised units like the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences (FCS) units after it became abundantly clear that their disbandment was a terrible mistake but, on the other hand, dithering on the establishment of Anti-Gang units for the Western Cape. Without dedicated and sustained capacity, underpinned by expert knowledge and investigative experience, being a key thrust to drive intelligence-led, smart policing, we will never crack the conundrum of rising, violent and organised crime in South Africa.
The fundamental problem we face as a country in effectively tackling and reducing crime is a lack of political will within the ANC national government to do the things that are required to turn the police service around to make it an effective crime-fighting organisation. If the ANC remains in government, the chronic crisis of under-staffing and under-resourcing at station level will
continue, our Crime Intelligence will remain in crisis and the over-burdened Detective Services will continue to operate in distress.
Only the voters can ensure an improvement in policing because the only solution to these problems, so that we stand a chance of reducing crime, is for the ANC to be voted out of power and for a new national government to be installed that brings total change and that will have the political will to fix the fundamentals in the police.