Police capacity to handle riots was virtually destroyed in a restructuring exercise in 2006, leaving officers ill-equipped to handle the wave of xenophobic violence that has swept the country in the past two weeks, researchers say.
As the violence in Gauteng worsened this week, the police scrambled to bring in extra capacity from around the country. On Tuesday the deployment of the elite National Intervention Unit — normally used for crises such as heists and for transporting high-profile or dangerous criminals — was announced. Crowd-control officers from other areas were rushed to Gauteng.
But as violence spread to Durban, North West and Mpumalanga, the police accepted that they could not cope and asked for military support. On Wednesday President Thabo Mbeki ordered in the troops.
In the small hours of Thursday morning the first South African National Defence Force (SANDF) units were deployed, assisting an operation at three hostels in Gauteng. According to a joint police-defence force statement, the troops secured the perimeter of the area while police carried out the search.
The statement said the operation had been “extremely successful and resulted in 28 arrests being effected, 150kg of dagga being seized and firearms, ammunition and suspected stolen property being recovered. There were no incidents of violence during the operation.”
Police experts have long warned that a 2006 restructuring of the South African Police Service (SAPS) crippled its capacity to deal with public disturbances. At the time the restructuring was said to be a response to falling numbers of such events and drastically cut the number of officers in the specialist crime combating units (CCUs), sending about half of them to local police stations.
CCUs had gone through a number of names, including the public order policing unit — itself the reincarnation of the apartheid riot squad.
A 2007 study carried out by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) quoted “members” and “managers” of the units warning that the restructuring was ill-ÂÂconsidered.
Before the restructuring, said the report, the Gauteng unit consisted of 1 383 operational members in seven platoons, based in different areas of the province.
The restructuring reduced the number of platoons to three and cut the number of officers to 614.
Unit members interviewed told the ISS researchers that this led to falling morale, a lack of in-ÂÂservice training and local ÂÂintelligence-ÂÂgathering capability, and the deÂÂskilling of members in the specialist field of crowd management.
“The restructuring is one of the biggest mistakes made by SAPS management,” a police officer was quoted saying.
The 2007 report — by researcher Bilkis Omar — said: “While there have been no major incidents at public gatherings thus far, and the CCUs seem to be coping, these units have not been tested to their full capacity. That test will arise when a spontaneous incident of violence occurs in a crowd situation.”
The report, entitled SAPS’s Costly Restructuring, was presented to senior SAPS management. It ÂÂrecommended that they reconsider the 2006 restructuring.
Although the redeployment was based on the belief that incidents of crowd violence had decreased, Omar found that they had in fact increased by 64% between 2002 and 2005.
The study also set out to understand whether the police would have the capacity to manage the crowds during the 2010 World Cup.
It covered the Ekhuruleni Metro Police Department (EMPD) as well as the SAPS because the two organisations’ mandates overlap.
The study was particularly scathing of EMPD members’ handling of crowd management situations, saying they were “trigger-happy” and perceived SAPS members as being “too lenient” and “cowardly”.
This week suspended Ekurhuleni police chief Robert McBride was in the news after he waded into a volatile stand-off in RamaphosaÂÂville squatter camp. According to one report, his intervention merely worsened the situation.
Sally de Beer, spokesperson for acting police national commissioner Timothy Williams, defended the restructuring as having strengthened capacity at police-station level.
Local officers were “among the first to respond to these types of situations and their training and expertise is invaluable”, she said.
“They are also on standby to get called up into groups and units within a short period of time, as they are being in this situation.”
But the report’s warnings have been vindicated by the events of the past two weeks, said Omar, as well as Henri Boshoff, also from the ISS.
Boshoff said: “It was soon clear that these units could not cope. The SAPS … then called for the support of police from station level as well as the metro police.”
Omar told the Mail & Guardian this week the deployment of the National Intervention Unit was an admission that the ordinary CCUs were unable to cope.
She said it would reduce the elite unit’s capacity to respond to other crises — its core business.
“It also means that the incidents have reached a serious proportion because the unit is normally deployed only for medium to high-risk operations,” said Omar.
De Beer said in response that the unit was national, as its name implied. It “will be deployed at any place in the country irrespective of where [its] home base is.
“Sufficient members are still ÂÂavailable in the provinces from which they have been deployed; only one platoon each was deployed from other provinces.”
Omar said the redeployment of CCU platoons to Gauteng meant that if incidents flared elsewhere, they would have to return home.
Boshoff said the deployment of the military should be welcomed as it will assist the police and would also serve as “a show of force” which should deter would-be attackers. He said that the law allows for the SANDF to support the police.
The SANDF’s remit is very specific: it will state the location of the deployment and a time frame for it. Boshoff said the SANDF will help the police to carry out tasks such as search and seizure and would withdraw when the police could handle things alone again.