SAPS in spending straitjacket as it sheds officers by the thousands

31 August 2016

In the first quarter of the current financial year, the SAPS has already shed 1 000 members due to dismissals, retrenchments, resignations and retirements, according to a SAPS management testimony to the Police Portfolio Committee meeting in Parliament today. 

This does not seem to be the end of SAPS shedding personnel for the year. According to the same report, our police service loses 6 000 members per annum on average, and most of these vacancies are not being filled. Reductions in the budget baseline of the SAPS for the medium term period will be effected mainly from Compensation of Employees, which means that SAPS will reduce its expenditure by not filling most vacancies that open up.

The effect of this is that police officers, and especially detectives, already constrained by under-capacity, will be further overburdened, which restricts their ability to fight crime – the main responsibility of our country’s police service.

Earlier this year, a reply from Police Minister Nathi Nhleko to a DA parliamentary question revealed that almost half as many new police officers came out of SAPS training academies into active service in the previous financial year compared to four years ago.

This is a very worrying trend which means the South African Police Service, already suffering from personnel shortages at station-level across much of the country, is shrinking and will have less capacity to prevent, combat and investigate crime in the future. The numbers showed that the last three financial years of SAPS Academy graduate numbers represent a more than 50% aggregate drop in trained officer output compared to the two financial years before that. 

The culmination of all this will be an ever shrinking SAPS. The DA has long held that our police service should be growing, ideally to 250 000 operational officers, and that more resources should be allocated and better managed for fighting crime in South Africa. 

The safety of all South Africans should be government’s main priority and it is critical that key positions in the SAPS are filled, stations are adequately resourced and all personnel are well-trained and fully equipped. 

Issued by Zakhele Mbhele, DA Shadow Minister of Police, 31 August 2016