Criminal Justice System an Embarrassment
Ever so often, it takes a high profile case to show how incompetent the South African criminal justice system is. I have yet to find a compatriot who is not deeply embarrassed by the state's botched opposition to Pistorius' bail application.
To boot senior police investigator, Hilton Botha, fails to do what police ought to learn in Criminal Investigations 101, that the crime scene is "sacred" for forensics to succeed. But no, he walks around without proper detective wear, contaminating the evidence.
When a senior police investigator has seven charges of attempted murder against him, then something is radically rotten in the State of the Police. There is no reason for SAPS to be all gung ho when they cannot even get the basics right. And by the way, we have lots more failed investigations than successful ones and this failure is embedded within the DNA of the criminal justice system.
Many years ago I was a witness to the murder of my neighbour by a young white South African man. I mention his race because this was pivotal to the cavalier way the police dealt with this case.
Apart from botching the basic forensics, they released the guy on bail and soon he escaped. Years later he was caught in a major drug bust. I was called in as a witness and he was eventually sentenced to a long term in jail but while he was on the run, this incompetence caused the family much pain and anger.
When my laptop was stolen in September 2012 in the Waterfront, the CCTV footage that recorded it all was not even manned. Worse, the surveillance cameras are not even connected to SAPS in the Waterfront. The police refused to look at the footage immediately after the theft. They did so the next day, by which time the suspects had disappeared with the laptop.
Even though they identified and arrested them the next day, the police told me "they could not compel the crooks to tell them where my computer was." My case has been remanded several times and apparently, both of the accused had been previous offenders.
The sheer incompetence with a simple case like mine is mind-boggling and bodes ill for the more complex cases of murder and armed robbery. Spend a day in court, and it becomes clear why we have so many repeat offenders, high rates of bail, and even higher rates of recidivism.
Two years ago the photographic equipment of a photographer friend of mine was stolen from her house while she was in it. She called the police and ADT immediately. Both arrived at her house the same time. While the police were questioning her about the events, ADT returned with the equipment! And that is precisely the problem.
Police incompetence is shrouded in bureaucracy and red tape when more than half of them are barely literate and qualified to do their work. That is why private security firms have become more popular than the police and exceed them in numbers by nearly 75%.
This incompetence results in seriously low conviction rates. In 2009 a Treasury Official told the Portfolio Committee that: "Criminals know they have little chance of being caught. Should they be arrested, they know the chances are even less that they'll eventually appear in court. And, should they appear in court, the chances are even less that they'll be found guilty." Add to this our ridiculously low conviction rates for murder (13%), armed robbery (10%) and sexual crimes (11.5%), then the question arises whether the R40bn of the total budget spent on the police, is value for money?
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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