Were annual cop stats cooked?

Acting national commissioner Lieutenant-General Kgomotso Phahlane. Photo: Oupa Mokoena

Acting national commissioner Lieutenant-General Kgomotso Phahlane. Photo: Oupa Mokoena

Published Nov 28, 2015

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Cape Town - Parliament’s police oversight committee is to probe discrepancies in figures provided in the police annual report, possibly including crime statistics that may have been massaged.

This comes after acting national commissioner Lieutenant-General Khomotso Phahlane did a quality assurance check on the figures, and told the committee on Friday he had picked up anomalies.

Further work would be done to establish the extent of the problem, and a report handed to the committee.

Committee chairman Francois Beukman said if there had been amendments to the crime statistics after they had been verified by Stats SA – a new arrangement following concerns over the accuracy of the figures – it would be a serious matter.

“That’s why we have raised the issue of the location of the evaluation of this performance information within SAPS, what is the process?” Beukman said.

 

“Because we had an undertaking earlier this year with Stats SA on board, that there is verification, so if there is a deviation from that approach and there were material amendments of performance information, it’s serious.”

He cautioned that it had not yet been established whether the crime statistics had been altered, and said he would ask committee researchers to analyse the information so the committee could reach its own conclusions.

If there were material errors in the police’s performance information, it created “huge problems”, Beukman said, because it also called into question deductions drawn from the figures.

He said responsibility for signing off on them lay with suspended national commissioner Riah Phiyega. The committee has recommended

to Police Minister Nathi Nhleko that Phiyega be investigated for her part in the issuing of statements in her defence relating to the findings of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.

She also faces a board of inquiry based on the recommendations of Judge Ian Farlam in his report on Marikana, as well as an investigation into her tipping off of Western Cape commissioner Arno Lamoer about a probe into his alleged links with a Cape Town drug dealer.

Police management also briefed the committee on a plan to deal with the huge backlog of 603 000 case dockets.

Katlehong police station alone had 500 unresolved murder cases, Brigadier Leon Rabie told the committee.

Analysis of crime figures for Gauteng police stations showed those with the highest case loads tended to be close to one another, which would make it easier to intervene as in many cases the perpetrators were likely to be the same.

But stations like Midrand, Diepsloot and Linden had detection rates of under 20 percent, compared to a national target of 40 percent, he said.

Breaking down the crime figures by category also showed that while the overall trend in Gauteng was downward, some crimes were on the increase, including contact crime.

And while crime rates were declining in some parts, it was increasing elsewhere.

Brigadier Craig Mitchell outlined an operational plan to improve investigations, which would be co-ordinated by Lieutenant-General Bonang Mgwenya, the former chief operations officer sidelined by Phiyega.

Intervention teams from national level would focus on under-performing police stations identified by the analysis, he said.

Political Bureau

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