While anti-gun lobbyists are applauding the South African Police Service (SAPS) for its efforts in recovering lost and stolen guns, it has emerged that the police are incapable of looking after recovered guns in their possession.
This is one finding of research conducted by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) on behalf of Gun Free South Africa (GFSA), undertaken in 14 police stations in five provinces between July and October last year.
Released this month, the report, Recovery and Destruction of Firearms in South Africa, says that 198 438 guns were stolen or lost in that period, at an average of 66 a day.
While the SAPS has recovered 63% of those firearms, they are not safely out of criminal hands. A sample of 2 483 dockets closed between 1997 and 2001 found that two-thirds of recovered firearms cannot be accounted for. ”These firearms could still be at the police station or even lost, as there is no way of telling where each one of these is,” according to the report.
”SAP13 [gun] stores are in trouble,” GFSA’s national advocacy manager, Margy Keegan, told the Mail & Guardian. ”There are no instructions on the firearms and there is no way of tracking if they have been destroyed. There is a little bit of confusion, even a mess. The stores must be cleared out.”
Recovered guns that cannot be traced back to their legal owners should be destroyed, but instead are left to pile up at police stations, making the stations a target for criminals. According to the report only 14% of recovered firearms were sent for destruction.
Chaos in the gun stores is attributed by the report to inaccurate statistics of destroyed guns, illegible handwriting on dockets and bad docket management such as facts not being entered into the investigation diary. ”Even though keeping track of what happens to firearms at the end of each case requires a tally, this process does not take place in all the stations visited.”
The M&G’s attempts to obtain comment from the SAPS on its handling of recovered weapons were unsuccessful.