50% decline in Police Academy graduates is shrinking already under-staffed SAPS

15 May 2016

A reply from Police Minister Nathi Nhleko to a DA parliamentary question has 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.

Figures for SAPS Academy graduates released by the Police Ministry are as follows:

These numbers show that the last 3 financial years of graduate numbers represent a more than 50% aggregate drop in trained officer output compared to the two financial years before that. This is a glaring failure in the SAPS’ human resource management which is rooted in an incompetent top brass who have the wrong priorities.

As a department whose effectiveness in implementing its mandate to keep our communities safe depends almost entirely on having adequately-staffed and well-resourced stations, these figures mean that the SAPS will have fewer operational officers in the short to term medium for visible patrolling, vehicle roadblocks, public order policing and criminal investigation which form the basics of police action to deter and detect criminality.

Furthermore this declining intake of police recruits into the rank-and-file, in the face of normal attrition levels and the recent exodus from the Detective Service, will doubly exacerbate the under-staffing problem in the Service. It will affect an array of performance areas that directly affect ordinary citizens when they have to rely on the police in times of need:

Police response times will increase meaning that crime victims will have to wait longer for a police vehicle to arrive at a crime scene.

Detectives will carry bigger caseloads which means that crime victims will have to wait longer for their cases to be finalised and get to court for prosecution.

Visible patrolling will become even more infrequent which will create a more open field for opportunistic crimes like street robberies and car break-ins.

Minister Nhleko now needs to get his head in the game and provide political leadership to fix the fundamentals of our police service. His lacklustre track record so far has been that of a Minister whose sole concern is political manoeuvring to protect President Jacob Zuma. Every other major issue that should concern him receives either a light touch or benign neglect. He must either shape himself and the police up, or ship out.

Statement issued by Zakhele Mbhele MP, DA Shadow Minister of Police, 15 May 2016