Officers slam ‘lateral entry’

Police officers and crime experts generally back the recommendations of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation’s report on policing, and particularly its call for greater stability.

The report recommends that the current structure of the police force be made to work and that further restructuring be avoided.

It also calls for in-service training to be greatly strengthened to compensate for the shortfalls in basic training; promotions according to consistent standards; the development of stable and reliable systems of management and supervision; and a stronger framework for the management and supervision of additional reservists before their enlistment.

Boyane Tshehla, head of the crime and justice programme at the Institute for Security Studies, said the South African Police Service had been subjected to numerous restructurings since 2001, which had disrupted ‘a huge” system.

‘One week staffers were reporting to one person and the next week to someone else,” he said.

Because of the ‘lateral entry system, where a guy could come in as a lawyer”, some new managers had no police experience. ‘Others are not good station managers, but you take them to a station and presume that because of their higher rank, they will be.”

Tshehla added that restructuring had resulted in the disbanding of many specialised outfits, including the area crime combating unit, the serious and violent crime unit and the family violence, child protection and sexual offences unit, which became station-level detective units. ‘If you send [each of] them to different stations, you’re not going to retain their expertise because they’ll be forced to be generalists and not specialists,” he said.

On the question of additional reservists, Tshehla commented that the issue was not numbers but the effectiveness of the people already in the system.

The general secretary of the police and prisons union Popcru, Abbey Witbooi, said the disbanding of the area system and introduction of ‘clusters” had created new problems, with some officers being under-skilled and stations being under-resourced. ‘What the department has to do now is review their logistics and financials to ensure that the cluster system does not militate the initial objective, which was to bring service closer to the people,” he said. ‘It needs to do a maximum and minimum skills audit to determine what the skills levels in these clusters are.”

Witbooi said in-service training would serve as a useful refresher for officers, many of whom had not had their skills polished since entering the force. He pointed to the Limpopo department of home affairs robbery investigation — where the police failed to secure the scene and contaminated evidence — as an example of what could happen when people who should know procedures do not follow them.

He said that an adequate framework for managing and supervising reservists was in place. Popcru favours the recruitment of additional reservists now that government has agreed to pay them.

Speaking on condition of anony­mity, officers interviewed by the Mail & Guardian were highly critical of ‘lateral entry”, saying it undermined morale, while their redeployment harmed their efficiency.

‘The worst thing you can do to a policeman is to make him take orders from somebody who is not a cop,” said an inner-city inspector.

Another police officer complained that his redeployment had meant learning about an area all over again and had weakened his ability to solve crimes.