The ANC’s move in its policy discussion document to advocate a single police service for South Africa, which would place the municipal, metro and traffic police under the command and control of the national police commissioner, has already found favour in some quarters.
Professor Moses Montesh, who was a police officer for 11 years and is now a senior lecturer in policing at the University of South Africa, believes there is no compelling reason to justify autonomous regional police agencies.
In the wake of the ANC’s 52nd national conference in Polokwane in 2007 he said it was certain that road traffic and municipal policing would fall under the command of the national police commissioner, thereby abolishing the current devolution of powers.
In a paper published last year, titled “Single public service versus single police service: A case for the South African Police Service”, Montesh wrote that the danger of establishing autonomous police agencies was that they tended to behave like “militias”.
In listing the reasons why South Africa should build a single police force, Montesh argued that available resources do not permit the huge duplication of functions, units and expenses incurred in replicating nine training and other support institutions for the nine regional police services, plus the national police service and numerous metro and municipal divisions.
Experience in the United States and elsewhere suggests that where policing agencies are fragmented, the standard of training and other support services is likely to diminish because of a lack of resources, he said.
“A single police agency is easy to manage because it consists of one set of rules and regulations, and a single command of control, methods and procedures.”
Montesh pointed out that there was no evidence to suggest that regional police services were more human rights conscious or non-discriminatory than a national police service.
According to the discussion document, the intention in Polokwane was not to have all law enforcement agencies merged into “one monolith”.
Certainly, military police such as the South African Revenue Service’s customs unit and the game rangers of national parks were not intended to be absorbed into a single police service, the policy document stated.
“It is clearly intended to show how ‘the municipal, metro and traffic police’ are to come under the command of the national police commissioner,” the document suggests.
However, Dr Johan Burger, a former police officer who is now a senior researcher with the crime and justice programme at the Institute for Security Studies, believes that arguments in favour of the integration or amalgamation of the various police structures are “unconvincing”.
Section 199 (1) of the Constitution provides for a single police service, while section 205 (1) refers to a national police service. Yet Section 206 (7) of the Constitution provides for the establishment of municipal police services, he pointed out.
“It is obvious from these provisions that the Constitutional Assembly, which approved the Constitution on October 11 1996, intended for this country to have both a single national police service and municipal police services,” said Burger. “In other words, we should have only one national police service, but we can have any number of municipal police services.”
Burger believes both services have important roles to play. “What is necessary is to clarify these roles and, of course, to ensure proper regulation and oversight, as provided for in the Constitution,” he said.