JAUNDICED EYE
SAPS: Time for a post-Cele change of strategy
For obvious reasons, murder is the most heinous of crimes. The deliberate taking of another’s life shrieks eternally for resolution.
Resolution, in turn, involves the State determining who was responsible and exacting punishment. Woe is the country where people can be killed with impunity. South Africa is such a country.
Over the past five years, the SA Police Service (SAPS) has closed — meaning thrown in the investigatory towel — on almost 77,000 murder dockets. Since there were approximately 115,000 murders in those five years, that means SAPS has simply given up on two-thirds of the murders committed between 2018 and 2023.
These dismal figures were this week provided by Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, in response to a parliamentary question by the Democratic Alliance. In all, 5.4 million case dockers were closed over the five-year period, including 40,000 attempted murders and 62,000 rapes.
In contrast, in most Western democracies, it is extremely rare for a murder case to be closed except by the identification of a suspect, their arrest, trial and conviction. Although a protracted and initially unsuccessful investigation may become inactive or a “cold case”, these are periodically reviewed with the view to identifying shortcomings in the original investigation and finding new paths, often using new technologies, to break the case.
In the United Kingdom, even when cases are closed, the police have a statutory obligation to review unsolved cases at regular intervals.
In South Africa, it’s a fact of life that only a small proportion of serious crimes are investigated and solved. Not only is SAPS absolutely terrible at crime prevention, but when crimes are committed, it’s equally hopeless at solving them. Solve rates for all crimes have dropped precipitously. In 2012, SAPS was able to solve 34% of the murder cases opened, but it has been falling steadily and by last year this was down to 12.4%.
Over the past five years, calculated at a 20% solve rate, that equates to around 23,000 solved cases out of the 115,000 murders that took place over that period. By closing as unsolvable a further 77,000 murders, that leaves only about 15,000 open cases still being worked on.
The iniquitous effect of SAPS’s manipulating its performance statistics can be seen when one extrapolates these “closed docket” rates of 66% to the bigger picture. Approximately 620,000 people were murdered in South Africa between 1994 and the beginning of 2024. (The comparative figure for the same period in the United States, which has a 5.5 times larger population, is 530,000 murders.)
From the parliamentary reply by the Minister, we now know that it’s possible that approximately 415,000 of those murders were simply closed as being unsolvable. No more investigation. No further attempt at achieving justice.
This is political smoke and mirrors. A high percentage of unsolved cases brings critical attention and criticism from the opposition parties. When using overly simplistic quantitative management methods, it’s tempting to just close dockets. Take two-thirds of them out of the equation and the statistics look deceptively better.
Gareth Newham, head of the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme at the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) says the ploy is part of a “serial crisis” in the top management of SAPS. “There’s a lack of clearly articulated objectives and strategies to achieve these.”
Tweaking the murder statistics is not only morally abhorrent to the victims and their families. Newham points out that murder — which has increased by 77% in the past dozen years — is the prime driver in the key statistics, a proxy for the incidence and distribution of all criminal violence. A mere 12% of SAPS precincts account for 50% of murders and under 3% of precincts account for 20% of murders.
“Using murder as the primary statistic, you can determine what drives killings and other violence in different parts of the country. In the Western Cape it is gang activity, in KwaZulu-Natal it is taxi disputes, illegal mining in Mpumalanga and Free State.”
“If SAPS focused, prioritised, measured, investigated properly, and improved accountability,” says Newham, “their performance could quickly be much improved.”
“Not every murder has a different murderer behind it. About 20% of criminals commit 80% of violence. If you go after that relatively small number of criminals involved in ongoing serious, violent activity, that’s how you reduce murder.
“This is a proven strategy against violent crime internationally and in South Africa. Over a two-year period, Gauteng police focused on fewer than 3,000 known criminals and eventually arrested about 1,000 of them. By doing this, they managed to reduce car hijackings by 32%, home invasions by 20%, and business robberies by 19%,” says Newham.
This is a far more successful strategy, Newham argues, than the high-visibility strategy in high-crime areas of random roadblocks, random searches, and random patrols. This approach delivers 700,000 arrests a year but “90% of those cases don’t go anywhere and, in any case, these are not the serious criminals.”
The other leg to any improvement in the clearance rate is more and better deployment of detecting resources. At present, according to serving police officers I’ve spoken to, much of their expertise is squandered because of the amount of time they are forced to spend on administrative rote work that could be more efficiently and cheaply done by clerical assistants.
The Detective Services personnel are underpaid and overworked. Low morale, fuelled in part by race barriers to promotion, has led to SAPS shedding a third of its detectives over the past half dozen years and now has only 17,000 left. In the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape more than a fifth of the detectives’ vehicles are inoperable.
DA MP Lisa Schickerling told Newzroom Afrika that the closure of the dockets, although unacceptable, was understandable. Every detective has a case-load of between 300 and 400 cases at any moment, which makes it physically impossible to investigate properly.
She says that a case towards the bottom of the pile might require just a minor action by the investigating detective but because their caseload is growing on a daily basis this is not done. “More often than not, these cases are then closed without proper investigation,” Schickerling says.
As bad as the situation is now, it is set to get worse unless Mchunu sets a different strategic course from that of his useless predecessor, Bheki Cele. “As the system stands now, it is not functioning at all. It is not delivering public safety,” says Newham.
ISS hopes that the new minister will be open to adopting a different approach. “We have the resources, we have the know-how,” says Newham. “But it has to start at the highest management level of SAPS. You have to get the right people in there, give them the authority and the political backing to reform the police.”
It is admirable that ISS’s optimism remains undaunted, despite so many years of seeing its advice ignored. But as with so many other aspects of governance in this country, the momentarily changed circumstances brought about by the Government of National Unity — an apparent willingness to let go of old ideological shibboleths, to implement international best practice — offers a rare opportunity. One can only hope that SAPS seizes it.
However, this being South Africa, while hoping for the best it’s wise to expect the worst.
