SJC and EE launch case against Police over allocation of resources
Today, March 30, 2016, the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and Equal Education (EE) have announced that they will be taking Minister of Police Nathi Nhleko and the acting National Commissioner of Police Kgomotso Phahlane to court on the ongoing inequitable, irrational and unjust allocation of police resources.
The announcement was made at a press conference on the site of the proposed Makhaza Police Station in Khayelitsha. The Makhaza Police Station, which was a “priority” for the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the Western Cape in 2004, is set to be built in the current SAPS precinct of Harare – the least resourced precinct in the province. Currently planning and design for the station is scheduled for 2016/2017 with construction scheduled for 2018/2019, fourteen years after being identified as a priority by SAPS.
In 2014, the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of Police Inefficiency and a Breakdown in Relations between SAPS and the Community of Khayelitsha (the Khayelitsha Commission) explained that “[o]ne of the questions that has most troubled the Commission is how a system of human resource allocation that appears to be systematically biased against poor black communities could have survived twenty years into our post-apartheid democracy.”
The SJC and EE have also since confirmed that a similar pattern applies in KwaZulu-Natal, where peri-urban Black communities with high crime rates are vastly under-resourced compared to other communities. Given that the same underlying causes of this disparity are present in the other seven provinces, it is likely that they too perpetuate the inequities of Apartheid.
Despite repeated requests from the SJC and EE for the Minister and the acting National Commissioner to act on the pattern of inequitable, irrational and discriminatory resource allocation, no action has been taken.