It is truly a broken Blue Line

The DA has a fully-worked international-best practice policy which proposes that SAPS members are trained for every eventuality, says the writer. File picture: Henk Kruger

The DA has a fully-worked international-best practice policy which proposes that SAPS members are trained for every eventuality, says the writer. File picture: Henk Kruger

Published Sep 14, 2015

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It is the fault of the Department of Police that so little has been done to protect officers, says Dianne Kohler Barnard.

Pretoria - The “National Tactical Response Plan” referred to by President Jacob Zuma on Police Day, is a section of a plan presented to the Portfolio Committee on Police on August 28.

It harks back to the 2011 Summit on Police Deaths, and the 10-point plan adopted at that time, although it has become obvious that the plan is failing the SAPS today.

One has to question the commitment to the plan of a Minister of Police who tried to cancel last Thursday’s Parliamentary debate on police deaths the day after two officers had been killed in Gauteng, and another had shot dead his wife, then committed suicide.

The full plan is titled, “Measures Implemented to Ensure Safety of SAPS Members and Address Unnatural Deaths”.

Patently these measures aren’t working. Which is why we have had 61 officers die – more than one a week – this year, most of them in Gauteng, followed by KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.

READ AN OPINION PIECE BY POLICE MINISTER NATHI NHLEKO

The problem with the report is that it does exactly what most documents produced by the Police Department do: it details the facts and figures in terms of the “how”, and the “here”, but fails to address the “why”.

The last analysis done by the SAPS on attacks on officers was in 1998. Obviously it must be redone, factoring in today’s environment, for without the answers as to “why” police are killed, or killing themselves, the problem will never be tackled head-on.

The report does refer to the need to conduct research – which should have been done the moment it was realised the criminal game plan had changed, updated to determine global trends. The Civilian Secretariat should have ensured an annual review. It didn’t.

As ever, this plan sounds wonderful on paper. The analysis provided isn’t analysis at all but simply a list detailing facts such as that most members killed off duty are victims of crime; most members killed in incidents of violence are shot; and more members are killed off duty than on duty.

Not once is there an indication that anyone in the SAPS has asked “why?” to any of these statements.

That given, there is still the perennial problem the SAPS has: its inability to implement proposals and plans. Allow me to cite some examples:

* It’s wonderful to call for the identification of skills gaps based on operational needs – but if each station may only send three or four members a year to training – the majority fall behind.

* It calls for skills development – when we know that up to 40 000 SAPS members have no firearm competency certificate, having either failed or simply not done the test.

* It calls for defensive vehicle training – when we know that thousands of members have no driving licences.

* It calls for interaction through Community Police Forum structures – which are attended by one or two officers.

* It says police must develop a culture of awareness, yet they do 12-hour shifts and so cannot maintain such a culture.

* It refers to maintaining high levels of physical fitness – yet so many police officers are grossly overweight.

Each concept sounds proactive and a means to succeed until reality gets in the way.

Indeed while interrogating the document, there is a moment when one wonders if the scribe has ever actually been out on to the streets to watch our police officers.

Police are supposed to be issued with a list of gear that is frequently not available at the stations over which the PPC does oversight.

The so-called bullet-proof vests are actually just bullet resistant and are extremely heavy, hot and old fashioned and so are frequently simply not worn. And of the 194 852 personnel, with 165 000 operational members, just a relative handful received training last year, with the SAPS management detailing for example: 3 111 on a shotgun; 3 345 on a rifle and 4 203 on a handgun. These figures are essentially smoke and mirrors. The training is inadequate – and failing.

The point is that our SAPS officers are dying because they don’t have refresher courses annually.

 

The SAPS are prepared to leap into action once an officer has been killed, but no tangible, proactive steps are being taken to actually prevent that murder in the first instance.

I didn’t know any of the 61 police officers who have died this year. And I didn’t know their families or their children or their mothers or fathers. But I do know the families of people who have been murdered all over the country, and I know the devastation such a horror wreaks. These are the people who kissed them goodbye every morning, and prayed that they would come home safe, but worried endlessly that they wouldn’t.

And then there are their colleagues who returned to an office with an empty desk, and their community, with members quietly pleased that a police officer lived nearby, as though that would somehow steer the criminals that run like cockroaches through every street in our land, away from their homes.

I do know that the officers were on duty – to protect and defend us. These were people with brave hearts and such a generosity of spirit that they would give their lives for any one of us. Being a police officer was not a job for them, it was what they were. Police wear their uniform on the inside as well as on the outside, and they belong to a family in blue.

 

It seems obvious that this minister, and the minister before him, should have ensured that research was done on police deaths, be they murder or self-inflicted.

Our citizens are not easily convinced to feel sympathy towards our officers, because a third of them are scared of the police. Today nearly half of South Africans feel there is no point in reporting crime because they do not trust our police. It is truly a broken Blue Line.

It’s been broken by cadre deployment.

The Richard Mdluli-era Crime Intelligence has left our nation’s crime intelligence apparatus broken and ineffectual so police officers every day risk their lives on the streets of South Africa without the intelligence they need to protect themselves and citizens.

The latest police minister should be able to tell us why our officers are more likely to be killed while off-duty, than while on-duty, whether they are targeted because they are police out of uniform; or because they try to tackle crime while off duty; or are they mainly inexperienced and barely trained constables?

Are they targeted for their firearms? Why are our experienced officers being executed – is it tied in with gangs?

He simply doesn’t know. Sadly what he does seem to “know” is that he has the power to ignore the courts and hire a man so patently unsuitable to be the head of the Hawks that when the announcement came, jaws dropped across the country.

It said in bold capital letters that he will play politics with the police no matter the consequences, in his determination to protect Zuma.

He should instead be applying his mind on how best to save our police, and how to stop the president insulting them by telling them to fight back – as though police officers stand with their hands at their sides waiting to be shot.

He should be asking how many of these deaths we should lay at the feet of an inefficient Department of Police?

He owes it to the hard-working officers, who risk their lives so we may be safe, to make sure they are well-resourced, and properly trained. No police officer should be left vulnerable to attack because of a failure of management to take these issues seriously.

There is no single reason our officers are being shot dead. There is no single reason they are killing their families and themselves. But it is the fault of the Department of Police that in 21 years so little has been done to protect them. The DA has a fully-worked international-best practice policy which proposes that our members are trained for every eventuality.

To do that would be the best tribute we can pay to those brave men and women who have lost their lives in the line of duty and while off duty.

 

Because police lives do matter.

* Dianne Kohler Barnard is an MP and the DA’s spokesperson on police.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

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