Thick blue line is not the answer

Throwing more money at the South African Police Service (SAPS), increasing the size of the police force and putting more coppers on the beat will not reduce criminality, experts warn.

Ironically, the SAPS itself encourages South Africans to put their faith in bigger policing. It has made the ‘stabilisation” and ‘normalisation” of crime one of its strategic objectives. And Jackie Selebi, the national police commissioner, has promised ‘further refinement of policing methods to consolidate the downward trend in violent crimes”.

Analysts warn, however that such thinking can result in wrong-headed strategic responses, including massive recruitment drives, fast-track training and too much emphasis on visible patrols.

With 125 512 policemen and women, South Africa’s ratio of one police officer per 377 citizens compares favourably with that of more developed countries. The private security industry employs a further 483 000 personnel.

But numbers do not amount to effective crime-fighting. ‘The police don’t prevent crime,” says David Bayley, criminal justice professor at New York State University. ‘That is one of the best kept secrets of modern life.”

Adds Anthony Altbeker, who spent an entire year accompanying SAPS officers on patrol: ‘Police are a blunt and ineffective tool for preventing crime.”

The experts point out that when crime becomes epidemic and anyone, anywhere can become a target, law enforcement becomes an almost impossible task.

Where offenders are not caught on the crime scene and there is no information about their identity, arrest rates generally fall to well below 10%, even in developed countries.

In these terms, South Africa’s police force is not performing any worse than in established democracies. According to research by the Institute of Security Studies’ Ted Leggett, conviction rates are not out of kilter with those of the United Kingdom or the United States.

There is one notable exception — murder. Someone is arrested in one out of four cases in South Africa and only one out of five suspects who go to court land up behind bars.

In some countries, up to 150 detectives work on a single murder case. The murder caseload per officer in South Africa is more than 20 times that of the United Kingdom or United States.

But the mismanagement of murder cases is not the result of lack of resources alone. More important are ‘smart” resources, good management, accountability and high ethical standards.

‘Massive recruitment allows police to manage their workload better,” says Altbeker. ‘But it disguises weaknesses in the system.”

He warns that large-scale resources are being allocated to ‘dumb policing” such as manning roadblocks or high-density deployment, with one result: crime is displaced, not prevented.

Altebeker says the recruitment drive which followed the end of the recruitment moratorium in 2000 had pushed so many trainees through the system that training institutions resembled ‘sausage factories”. At the same time, there is a continuing legacy of barely literate police officers who struggled to take or write proper statements.

Crime scenes are not secured properly, statements are incoherent, dockets disappear because of negligence or corruption, evidence is lost and simple procedures are not followed. To make an arrest, a police officer has to rely on what Altbeker calls ‘the detective’s holy trinity”: witnesses, confessions and physical evidence.

Yet time and again investigations are botched because crucial evidence has been destroyed or overlooked or because witnesses were not asked the right questions.

The Brett Kebble murder, in which his car was removed from the crime scene and taken to a panel beater before it had been properly examined, was a recent case in point. So was the murder of four-year-old Makgabo Matlala, granddaughter of Transvaal Judge President Bernard Noepe, whose dead body was found under her parents’ bed 24 hours after she had been murdered — despite a police search of the crime scene on the day of the crime.

Training gaps and a lack of accountability seem to be a root cause for sloppy crime scene management. ‘The first guys on the scene have to know what they are doing,” says Altbeker. ‘There are no consequences when they mess up.”

Work done with ‘laxity and incompetence” was how Free State Judge Arrie Hattingh described the investigation of a murder which would not have led to a conviction had the suspect not taken the stand and incriminated himself. The murder weapon had disappeared from the relevant police station and key DNA tests had not been processed a year and a half after the murder because of staff shortages and broken laboratory equipment.

Even if the crime scene is properly secured and the physical evidence examined thoroughly and urgently, the statements collected by investigating officers often fail to impress prosecutors or judges. Cases rely heavily on the quality of statements, and badly taken or written statements get cases thrown out of court.

SAPS spokesperson Sally de Beer says all entry-level officers underwent intensive training to ensure the accurate recording of affidavits, though the reality on the ground is rather less rosy.

Because of low literacy and language competency levels, many officers cannot give a coherent account in the witness box, and make elementary mistakes such as misspelling names and addresses and misrecording number plates.

Such problems were ‘fixable”, says Altbeker — statements could be retaken, and senior detectives could rewrite them and make them more coherent. But this could also cost the prosecution cases.

Under the rules, all case dockets must be inspected by a detective unit commander before being submitted to court. And, on receiving of the docket from court, the commander is required to guide and instruct the investigating officer.

Dockets should be reviewed every week until the case is closed, and inspected again before going to court.

But inefficient management and control of investigations and appropriate docket allocation to investigating officers at provincial and area levels are major points of concern. Dockets are lost or even sold.

‘Rank inflation” is seen as another problem. Officers with too little experience and limited training were moved up the hierarchy too quickly as a result of quota-based affirmative action and trade union pressure.

‘We all accept that transformation is necessary, but it needs to be implemented with the necessary sense of responsibility,” said Johan Burger, former assistant commissioner and head of SAPS operational coordination.

According to Burger, who now works for the Institute of Security Studies, ‘command problems now feed into the whole chain”.

To make matters worse, the disbanding of the police anti-corruption unit did away with the only independent internal regulatory system. Now unit commanders are expected to take disciplinary action — which often puts them in the firing line.

At one Johannesburg police station, the suspension of a member suspected of corruption was followed by complaints of sexual harassment against the commanding officer. The officer was moved to another station.

Altbeker says a form of ‘shock treatment”, such as a judicial inquiry into corruption and a reform of the disciplinary system, was needed in order to turn the tide against the lack of professionalism and professional ethics.

Ivor Chipkin of the Human Sciences Research Council points out that crime in South Africa is symptomatic of a deeper crisis in the way South Africans are being socialised, ‘a way that is not conductive of a democratic society that focuses on respect and tolerance”.

Where crime has many causes, the police — no matter how big their ranks — are not the only or even the most effective vehicle to prevent or reduce the symptoms. Nevertheless, ‘we all wish that the police could save us from ourselves”, Altbeker says wryly.

Yet crime levels are dropping in those areas where communities themselves get involved, demand accountability or lose their fear of cooperation and where some of the many other factors that cause or contribute to crime are being tackled.

The fact, though, that the key witness in the murder case of Judge Ngoepe’s four-year-old grand-daughter Makgabo now has to fear for his life shows that South Africa still has a long way to go to firmly establish value systems that will make a difference.