Durban - A frontline police unit – tasked with taking on the city’s most dangerous criminals – is almost running on its rims, with just a handful of low-performance, ill-equipped cars to respond to emergencies.
Durban’s Flying Squad covers a massive area – from Winklespruit, south of Durban, to Ballito, on the North Coast, and inland, to Hammarsdale – and members of the unit, who cannot be named, said, with a maximum of 13 to 14 officers working on each shift, they were under strain.
Without enough vehicles, and with the poor condition of the vehicles they did have, their job was becoming even more challenging, they said.
The policemen just wanted to be able to do their jobs properly, they said.
“We want to be out in the field, we don’t want to be sitting in the control room,” one said.
But at any given time, their unit had a maximum of only three cars – with peeling and faded signage – available to them.
And last week, one of these vehicles was not operational because it was damaged when policemen came under fire in KwaMashu at the weekend.
“And these are production line cars – not high-performance vehicles – that have to reach high speeds, every day,” one member said, “They’re old, too. They last a long time because they spend so much time in the garage.”
Some of the unit’s vehicles were as old as seven years and some were SUVs that were not designed to be used as specialised response vehicles and were ill-suited for high-speed chases.
Being used at high speeds and in offroad conditions meant the cars were subjected to higher-than-normal levels of wear-and-tear and more frequent damage, the officer said, but when the need for maintenance and repairs arose, many times cars that were sent to the garage sat there for months.
At the time of speaking to the Daily News, unit members said there were at least 12 to 15 cars in the garage.
And when vehicles were sent to mechanics, they complained of recurring faults due to shoddy workmanship.
The cars’ gearboxes would seize while police were pursuing suspects and the shocks were faulty.
Placing police in unsafe vehicles increased the risks associated with an already high-risk profession and some were choosing to take it upon themselves to arrange for repairs to be done privately, if they could, one of the policemen said.
This provincial police acknowledged they had received the Daily News’s requests for comment and would respond in due course. The problem, however, was not new.
Last year, sister papers of the Daily News, the Sunday Tribune , reported the unit had just one response vehicle on duty at a given time and The Mercury reported that the unit had been unable to respond when a woman was strangled in front of her husband in eManzimtoti because it did not have high-performance vehicles available.
After these articles were published, unit members said they were given new vehicles, but they were damaged afterwards and sent to the garage, where they had since remained.
In Port Elizabeth last week, The Herald reported that the city’s Flying Squad had only one car on the road, but that a few hours after they were contacted by the media, three vehicles, that were undergoing repairs, were released for use.
Daily News
* Use IOL's Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below.