Police Oversight: Inadequate SAPS training hampering the fight against crime

12 April 2016

South Africans of all walk of life are either victims of crime or terrified of becoming victims, therefore becoming prisoners in our own homes, cars and businesses. Over the next month I will therefore be embarking on a series of oversight visits across the country to drill down into how the “four U’s” (under-resourcing, under-staffing, under-equipping and under-training) impact on the SAPS’s ability to carry out their responsibility to protect the citizens of this country. On completion of this tour I will presenting a report to the Portfolio Committee along with proposals of how to reform the SAPS.

On the first leg of this tour I conducted a visit to the Phillipi Training Academy yesterday during which it became crystal clear that the high levels of crime in South Africa affect all of society with insufficient amounts of training being done to recruit and capacitate our officers.

My visit echoed the findings of the the Farlam Commission’s report into the Marikana massacre, which brought into sharp focus the consequences of a lack of training and experience in the SAPS, and attributed this travesty largely to insufficient and ineffective training, stating that“good and effective policing requires expert knowledge acquired by training and practical experience.”

The proper training of SAPS officers, both basic and on-the-job training, is vitally important to the effective functioning of the entire criminal justice system and acts as an important component in rebuilding the public’s faith in the SAPS.

Yet it seems that the training SAPS recruits are given is lost along the way, due to a lack of leadership that ensures strict adherence to what is taught in basic training and implements on-the-job training continuously.

In fact, in a reply to a parliamentary question revealed that not one cent was spent on training SAPS Senior Management Service (SMS) members during the last three financial years.

More broadly, out of the total expenditure by the SAPS in 2014/15, the spend on training and development while in the work place, represents 0.1% of total expenditure. This is clearly inadequate to meet the needs of strained police service.

On my oversight yesterday to the SAPS Training Academy I witnessed first-hand the kind of training recruits hoping to become SAPS officers receive. Basic training takes place over eight months, before recruits enter a year of on-the-job training, and involves instruction on a number of topics including crime prevention, crime scene management and community policing. While their training covers the correct fields, rising crime rates points to the inefficacy of the programme and its implementation. A number of cases underscore this point:

Police officers are often ill-prepared to deal with crimes that require a solid understanding of socio-economic conditions, first and foremost amongst which is domestic violence. In 2014/15 alone, almost 30 000 sexual offences and just over 54 000 serious assaults were committed against women. Yet, a recent report to the Portfolio Committee on Police on the implementation of the Domestic Violence Act (1998) - which places a number of obligations on SAPS members to provide a service to the victims who report incidences of domestic violence - showed that almost 1 out of 5 (18.7%) police stations were not compliant.

With regard to the DNA Act the Forensics Oversight and Ethics Board informed the Police portfolio committee in March that since the Act came into effect on 31 January 2015, a dismal 126 samples have been collected from a population of 162 423 offenders. This is 0.15% of their target, which should have been at 50% after the first year of collection. This was largely attributed to inadequate training for those responsible for collecting samples.

And thirdly, high profile cases such as murders of Inge Lotz and Reeva Steenkamp, raised serious questions about training relative to evidence collection and crime scene contamination by inadequately trained police officers. This compromises the ability of the state to prosecute offenders and decreases conviction rates.

What became clear from my oversight visit is that leadership, not only in the initial training of SAPS recruits, but more importantly in the leadership by station commanders and their higher-ups, is absolutely vital in ensuring that SAPS officers continue to implement what they learn in basic training, that this training is supplemented with further skills training on the job and that discipline and conformity to the law is maintained effectively.

Given the high levels of violent crime in South Africa, it is simply unacceptable that nothing has been spent to train the SAPS’s senior management. This is evidenced by the country’s murder rate which is five times higher than the global average.

The fact is that we are losing the fight against the tidal wave of crime in South Africa, and what is clear is that where the SAPS is the most under-capacitated, crime is the highest. Of equal concern, police officers themselves have become victims of crime which is largely attributable to their under-capacitation as illustrated by the rising numbers in cop deaths over the last year.

In order to ensure that the SAPS are adequately trained to fight crime in South Africa, the DA would take a number of steps to improve the quality of the recruitment and training program. Some of these steps include:

Ensuring there are enough trainers to guarantee the quality of training. 

Ensuring trainers are assessed to guarantee quality. 

Enhancing station management skills to ensure station commanders have the necessary management skills to account for their stations’ activities. 

Fighting crime is a matter of political will. The City of Cape Town is making meaningful strides in combatting crime in the province. An example of this is the training partnership with the United States’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) which has resulted in the United States government investing more than R10-million in the City of Cape Town metro police through drug enforcement training, study tours, school resources officers that we’ve had in training and also FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) management training since 2009. 

When SAPS leadership fails to ensure strict adherence to the training SAPS members receive on crime scene management, the evidence required to find and successfully convict a perpetrator may be thrown out of court. This denies justice to the victims and families of the victims of crime, decreases the conviction rate of perpetrators of crime, fails to inspire confidence in the criminal justice system and ultimately fails to restore the faith South Africans should have in our police service.

Clearly, SAPS management need to place greater emphasis on training, especially within the work environment. The DA’s vision is one in which our SAPS is well-trained, resourced and has the trust of the people they took an oath to serve and protect. This is a society that South Africans so desperately need and deserve. This society as envisioned by the DA is the only one that South Africans can truly value.

Issued by Zakhele Mbhele, DA Shadow Minister of Police, 12 April 2016