The South African Police Service’s claim that all Gauteng police stations have a family violence, child abuse and sexual offences (FCS) officer is ”a total untruth”, the Democratic Alliance said on Monday.
A DA survey showed the SAPS was misleading the public about the closure of police family and child violence units, spokesperson Mike Waters said in a statement.
The SAPS said on the Interface television programme on Sunday night that every police station throughout Gauteng had an FCS officer allocated to it.
”A telephonic survey by the DA shows that this is a total untruth,” he said.
”In fact, 23 police stations throughout Gauteng alone have no FCS officers allocated to them.”
Waters said it was clear to him that there was no proper plan in place to manage this process, and national police commissioner Jackie Selebi should urgently explain what had gone wrong and develop a rescue plan.
The motivation for dissolving the FCS units was that they were sometimes far from where the crimes were reported, and the reallocation process would make officers more accessible.
Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula had stated that provinces would be divided into clusters, with one police station designated as the cluster head.
FCS officers would be redeployed to these cluster heads and they would then investigate all relevant FCS cases in that particular cluster.
”But this argument is made nonsense of if many police stations have no FCS officers,” Waters said.
A further problem was that where police stations had FCS officers allocated to them, no provision was made for working space for them or for storing sensitive information.
According to the DA, in the East Rand 11 stations out of 39 had no FCS officers (Vosloorus, Zonkizizwe, Benoni, Sebenza, Kempton Park, Actonville, Crystal Park, Norkem Park, Dawn Park, Heidelberg and Johannesburg International airport).
Also, according to the DA, in Johannesburg six police stations out of 22 had none (Sandton, Midrand, Norwood, Rosebank, Booysens and Mondeor), and in Pretoria, six out of 28 also had no FCS officers.
Moreover, resources available to FCS officers who had been deployed were sorely lacking, according to Waters. – Sapa