Cape Town - While questions remain about who will be the province’s top cop, the minister of police has called for an end to in-fighting at management level within the SAPS.
National police spokesperson Brigadier Vish Naidoo said an announcement would be made “any time this week”.
“At the moment we are still working on some logistics, but we will communicate everything before the end of this month. It could be tomorrow or the day after that,” he said.
Talks on the replacement of provincial police commissioner General Khombinkosi Jula have been ongoing in the wake of the deployment of the SANDF to the province to stabilise gang-ridden areas.
While head of detectives, Jeremy Vearey as well as the head of the Anti-Gang Unit, Andre Lincoln, and chief of national intelligence, Peter Jacobs have been tipped for the position, MEC for Community Safety Albert Fritz has called for transparency in the process to appoint a replacement.
Speaking during the debate on Premier Alan Winde’s State of the Province Address this week, Fritz said the new commissioner had the task of addressing issues affecting the effectiveness of police in the province.
This sentiment was shared by the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union, which said leadership challenges need to be addressed before the army’s deployment was completed.
“The deployment of the SANDF is a short-term solution because beyond that we need policing that is well acquainted with the challenges of the province and is more proactive rather than reactive,” said the union’s Richard Mamabolo.
“We have a reactive minister who always speaks after events, is all talk but no action and that speaks to the lack of intelligence that the SAPS is supposed to have because some of these challenges are resource level because at national level they have not come up with a clear way of allocating their resources in a way that best utilises them.
“The leadership dynamics were such that we had a provincial commissioner who wanted to accumulate all forms of power and be the man at the centre of everything happening there and does not know how to work with the collective.”
Mamabolo added a lack of leadership had also been part of the problem.
“We had senior officers who don’t know who to account to and whose instructions to take forward and the infighting demonstrates that police cannot work in a committed manner in dealing with challenges in the province.
“Unless the minister takes action, he is running out of time because immediately after the army pulls out, are we expecting stability to remain while there is still infighting that is not being sorted out in the meantime?”
Earlier this week, Fritz’s office issued a report that looked into the competence of the detective services in the province.
According to the report, of the 2785 detectives servicing the 150 police stations across the province, 48% of had a case load of more than 200 dockets per person, which was above the 50-60 norm.
Fritz said the province experiences a shortage of around 548 detectives while 142 posts remain vacant, as well as the fact that:
* 91.7% had not received training in the Specialised Detective Learning Programme.
* 88.2% had not been trained to investigate fraud.
* 57% of the detective commanders had not completed the requisite training.
* 45.8% had not completed the Basic Detective Learning Programme.
Mamabolo said morale among their members in the province was at an all-time low owing to resourcing challenges.
“Just last week we were at the Kleinvlei police station in Cape Town as part of the Mandela Day events and you could see that the resources allocations are quite bad, there were many vehicles sitting there without wheels and you don’t understand why they aren’t fixed to provide service delivery to communities,” he said.
“And due to the fact that there are fewer resources going to the ground in the province where they are needed, you then have a situation with (lack of) training and dockets being left unattended which is due to either to the lack of skills and resources where you have one person responsible for a pile of dockets and that delays the justice system.
“Our members are highly demoralised; you get instances where every morning a police officer wakes up and leaves their home, they don’t know whether they are coming
back.”