Cape Town - The Western Cape’s standing committee on community safety said it was prepared to approach the courts to force the police to adhere to the public service commission’s recommendations to fill all vital posts within six months.
Commissioner Dr Tholumuzi Luthuli presented the committee with his report on the staffing problems in the province where 85% of the stations are under-resourced.
The Western Cape has high contact crime rates but also has the country’s lowest police-to population ratio at one officer for 509 people this year, having increased from one officer for every 385 people in 2016.
The national police department plans to reduce the number of officers from 193431 in the 2017/18 period to 191432 in 2020/21 due to budget cuts.
In terms of numbers the report found:
128 of the province’s 150 stations were understaffed.
As of 2014, there were about 2392 vacant posts.
About 2375 police members left the service between 2011/12 and 2015/16 period.
The shortage of police officers stood at 1012 in 2013.
Police Minister Bheki Cele has said he planned to approach the National Treasury to get funding to appoint more officers.
The South African Policing Union (Sapu) has welcomed his decision, saying the workforce was heavily overloaded.
“The lack of personnel in the police compromises service delivery. The overloaded personnel
are demotivated. The ratio that an officer deals with is highly abnormal,” said Sapu general secretary Oscar Skommere.
“Sapu calls on the National Treasury to treat the request from Minister Cele with the urgency it deserves. The lack of personnel in the police has reached a crisis stage.
“We will never overcome the crime crisis in our country if we do not deal with the lack of personnel. We are also calling upon this year’s matric students to seriously consider the police as an interesting career. We believe divisions like detectives, visible policing and crime intelligence are some of the most understaffed in the police. It is vital, important divisions like these that will make a huge difference in the fight against crime. We need more police officers in our streets.”
The committee’s acting chairperson, Mark Wiley, said they would be writing to the commission with further submissions before calling in the provincial and national commissioners to account for the situation in the province’s police stations.
“Police-to-population (ratio) is on the wrong side of the national average. At station level, that is where the majority of the vacancies are found; in detectives or visible policing and that is where the average person who feels unsafe has to report their crime and yet are we are getting reports that level of resourcing is declining,” he said.
Wiley said SAPS tactic of bringing in police officers from other provinces to help with the crisis in the province was not a sustainable long-term solution.
“You cannot counter
the problem we have, which is systemic criminality especially at community level by brigning in forces in a haphazard basis; it has to be a sustained, long-term presence, visible policing backed up by specialist operations.”