SAPS criminality audit reveals serious mismanagement

At a presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Police today, South African Police Service (SAPS) officials revealed that none of the police officers found to have criminal records during the recently completed criminality audit have been fired. 

A few weeks ago, the SAPS announced that there were 1448 criminal cops within the police service, ranging from thieves to rapists and murderers. Today they revealed that 306 of these SAPS members had criminal records before they joined SAPS and 1142 committed crimes whilst in the police. This included one Major-General. In fact, the vast majority of the 1448 are top brass. All are still employed by the SAPS today and have yet to be fired.

The 1448 leaves out details of the other 8000 police officers who were excluded from the audit because they had already been fired or their crimes were considered ‘petty offences'. Any offence is an offence and the police should be held to a higher standard.

I will be writing to the Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa, today to request that he explains the rationale for keeping convicted criminals in the police service.  No deadline has been set for the completion of the ‘audit process' which was begun in 2010 and not one criminal member of the SAPS has been dismissed.

According to SAPS officials today, police officers with criminal records or who have been found guilty by the courts will not be dismissed until internal disciplinary proceedings have been completed. This means that criminal police can carry on working or receiving a salary from SAPS until disciplinary proceedings are done.

This audit has shown that the lack of vetting of personnel, proper disciplinary systems and recordkeeping between different provinces and stations are all factors which have allowed criminals to work for the police.

This is purely the fault of SAPS management. No answers were forthcoming about when the SAPS stopped checking for criminal records for new entrants, or when station managers stopped reporting criminal activities on the part of their members.

It is past time that the SAPS management took speedy and decisive concrete action to clean up and stop allowing criminality within our police service. Unfortunately, they utterly failed to provide us with any assurance today that this will actually happen.

Statement issued by Dianne Kohler Barnard MP, DA Shadow Minister of Police, August 14 2013

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