Priorities in the wrong place: Return to Apartheid-era ranks pending, but SAPS quietly move to lower crime reduction targets

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has learnt that the South African Police Service's return to Apartheid-era ranks will be gazetted on 1 April 2010 - an exercise that the DA considers entirely reprehensible and completely unconnected from attempts to address South Africa's crime rate. Simultaneously, we have learnt that the Police Service has lowered its crime reduction target - an act of embracing mediocrity, instead of tackling the real challenges facing the SAPS.

At yesterday's budget vote workshop, the police portfolio committee was told that the SAPS has quietly reduced their violent crime reduction target from the previous 7-10% to 4-7% as a consequence of not being able to achieve the needed results.

Talk about shifting the goal posts. This move is a clear-cut admission of defeat. Aiming to achieve a 4-7% reduction in violent crime, in a country facing one of the highest crime rates in the world, is utterly sub-standard; it is a move that has no doubt been sparked by the very disappointing crime statistics revealed in the third quarter of last year, but it is also a move that demonstrates a chronic lack of ambition. That we should be exerting resources for changing rank and title names, while at the same time lowering our crime reduction targets, speaks volumes about this administration's real approach to safety.

The fact that this admission was made not by the minister or commissioner, but rather by a National Treasury official at a relatively obscure briefing, also says a great deal about how the ANC administration continues to play public relations games with the media and the public. The ANC will try, with great fanfare, to show their crime-fighting credentials by talking up populist issues like the so-called ‘shoot to kill' amendment to section 49 of the Criminal Procedure Act (after it had served its purpose of creating media headlines, the Police Minister quietly admitted that no significant change was being planned to section 49 at all). Now we see a really important announcement buried away in a budget vote workshop.

Like the now forgotten Shoot to Kill policy stunt, efforts at ‘militarising' the police ranks are attention-diverters. Instead of dealing with the real problems at hand, the SAPS is now bothering itself with rank changes. Right now we should be doing the hard yards, building new forensic science laboratories to get rid of the 23,000 sample backlog, overhauling the Police's chronically substandard officer training regime, and affecting real change in our Police ranks - the kind of change that would allow us to meet the crime reduction targets that we have set. Wasting our time on rank and title changes is unfathomable.

The new changes are almost identical to apartheid-era SAP ranks. The DA has learnt from a senior SAPS official yesterday that the rank changes will be gazetted at the beginning of the new financial year. We understand that the rank changes will look something like this:

Not only do these changes come at great financial cost, it is also highly problematic that the new rank structures and militarisation of the police is reminiscent of the Apartheid-era South African Police (SAP) - effectively a return to apartheid policing structures. This, together with increasing accounts of police brutality and a rise in civilian deaths at the hands of Police, leaves us with little reason to believe that crimes perpetrated by criminals will go down, and every reason to believe that crimes perpetrated by police officers will go up. The unions have expressed their disapproval of this return to Apartheid era policing structures, and we do too.

Last year we saw a 15% increase in the number of deaths in police custody or as a result of police action. The DA will now be submitting parliamentary questions to establish the salary and cost implications of having to rename the entire personnel structure, the number of existing officers that will be assigned to each newly constituted category, and most importantly how exactly name changes will impact crime.  

Clearly, the SAPS management is failing its members and in turn all South Africans by focusing on frivolities like rank and title, instead of admitting its failure to deliver and recommitting itself to the national strategy of taking South Africans forward into a safer future.

Statement issued by Dianne Kohler Barnard, MP, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of police, February 25 2010

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