Let us suppose that this evening you are sitting in your living room, relaxing after a tough week. You hear a noise. You look out your window and see intruders on your property. You call the police.

The police say they are seriously understaffed but will do their best.

By the time they arrive it is too late to prevent a robbery - or worse. 

Law-abiding citizens live with fears like this on a daily basis. But today is no ordinary day. It is National Police Day.

Today, 50 000 police officers - nearly one-third of the entire police force - will gather in Bloemfontein for an estimated R70 million ‘morale-boosting' event. Tonight, they will be on their way home on buses provided by the National Department of Police.

In the police's absence, criminals generally have a field day.

It should be called National Crime Day.

The spectre of lawlessness in the absence of law enforcement officers is precisely why members of the police force are prohibited from going on strike. The police are an essential service which, according to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), is defined as one that, if interrupted, would endanger the life, personal safety or health of the whole or any part of the population.

If taking 50,000 police officers off the streets is not an interruption to an essential service, then I don't know what is. In Langa in the Western Cape, for instance, the event will leave just 20 of the police station's 80 active officers on duty.

It is obvious that the decision to hold this event has not been thought through properly. The Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa, revealed as much this week when he was asked how much his department had spent on the event. In refusing to divulge the cost, he said:

"You ask me for the cost but can you really put a cost on a life? Our members protect lives and this is why we must congratulate them and show them that we care and that we appreciate them. This is to boost the morale."

According to his logic, holding this one-day event will save lives because police officers will come away re-energised and ready to take on the criminals again. He doesn't consider that taking police officers off the street is likely to cost lives, nor that the event could dent morale rather than boost it.

In fact, many police officers don't actually want to attend this jamboree.  They are required to. Their names were on a list of officers ordered to attend the event by national head office. Many of them, against their will, traveled through last night on a bus to be there for today's ceremonies. Tonight they will back on a bus on their way home to their families.  This is not a particularly effective morale booster.

If the Minister really wanted to boost morale, he could have used the money to give outstanding police officers performance bonuses or buy the bullet-proof vests and other equipment that so many police stations need, but don't have.

There is something else that the Minister hasn't thought through. And that is his own potential liability.

As the national Minister of Police, he has a constitutional duty "to prevent, combat and investigate crime, to maintain public order, to protect and secure the inhabitants of the Republic and their property, and to uphold and enforce the law." This gives substance to one of our inalienable rights, namely that "everyone has the right to freedom and security of the person, which includes the right to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources."

If a crime that could have been prevented in normal circumstances happens today or tonight, then the Minister could be found to have been derelict in his constitutional duty.

In law, it is called delictual liability. It refers to an instance where a person who has negligently or intentionally directly caused damage to the property of another, by an act or failure to act, must compensate that person for his loss. In this case, the Minister of Police, would be liable to be sued for negligence.

There is precedence for this. In 1995, Ms Alix Carmichele was attacked by a man with a history of rape convictions who had been released on bail. She argued in court that, given his past, the police and prosecutors had been negligent by allowing him back into society. After a protracted legal battle that went all the way to the Constitutional Court, she successfully sued the Minister of Safety and Security for damages.

In another judgment, a woman - known only as Ms K - was raped by three uniformed police officers. She successfully sued the Minister of Safety and Security on the grounds that the police had failed in its constitutional duty to protect her.

So, if someone was raped or assaulted today as a result of the decision to deplete our police force for a morale-boosting exercise, there may well be a case against the Minister.

I am not inciting people to sue the National Minister. But government representatives need to understand that, just as they expect citizens to take responsibility for their actions, they must do so too.

The decision to hold an event like this tells us a great deal about this government. Instead of getting to the root of a problem, in this case a dysfunctional criminal justice system, and finding solutions, it comes up with a frivolous and costly stunt that is entirely peripheral to its core business.

We are still waiting for the review of the criminal justice system promised by former Deputy Justice Minister Johnny de Lange in 2008. When he announced it, he was astonishingly frank. He said: "The situation is sometimes so overwhelming that we don't know what to do about crime. We have not necessarily taken the right decisions over the past 15 years or used resources efficiently. We have to brace ourselves now."

I and many others took this as a sign that government was finally going to start getting to grips with crime. Since then we have heard nothing.

Instead of planning expensive junkets that take cops off the streets, Mr Mthethwa should be working closely with the Justice Department to overhaul the criminal justice system to efficiently catch, prosecute and convict criminals. There would be no better morale boost for the police force, not to mention the rest of us.

This article by Helen Zille first appeared in SA Today, the weekly online newsletter of the letter of the Democratic Alliance, January 29 2010

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