Police fail to make 223 000 arrests for domestic abuse in 2 years

6 September 2017

In the last two years, the police failed to make a startling 223 306 arrests for domestic abuse in terms of the Domestic Violence Act (DVA). This is according to a reply to a DA Parliamentary Question.

Only 1 624 arrests were made, out of 224 930 warrants for arrest for domestic abuse.

The police therefore arrested less than 1% of people that committed any form of domestic abuse.

This is appalling given the very high levels of violence against women in our country.

The provincial breakdown is as follows:

Policing services are a national competency so the Minister himself must take responsibility for this failure, because the figures are equally terrible in all of the nine provinces that he oversees.

In Gauteng, of 62 593 warrants for domestic abuse, only 227 people received the protection they so desperately need.

That means that only 0.36% of those warrants were carried out by the police in the province with the highest rate of crime in South Africa.

The DVA monitoring report, between October 2016 to March 2017, presented by the Civilian Secretariat for Police (CSP) to Parliament’s Police Portfolio Committee today is therefore mind boggling.

The presentation revealed that during that period in Gauteng alone, only 6 reports of non-compliance by SAPS and only 6 disciplinary hearings were initiated despite the high number of arrests not made. Of the 11 stations visited in Gauteng and 234 nationally by the CSP, none of them were fully compliant with the DVA.

SAPS clearly seem to be making the exceptionally high rate of violence against women worse and continue to fail to keep our people safe.

Police Minister, Fikile Mbalula, must account for this colossal failure by the police that has only given the women of our country more reason to go on living in fear.

Issued by Zakhele Mbhele, DA Shadow Minister of Police, 6 September 2017