SA’s insecurity cluster of overburdened detectives, ineffective courts and overcrowded prisons

The lack of capacity of the police’s detective services came under scrutiny during a security cluster media briefing in parliament on Monday. Ian Cameron, chairperson of the portfolio committee on police, revealed that one detective has a caseload of over 400 cases. Cameron said even though the police have a high number of arrests due to Operation Shanela, the number of resulting convictions continues to be a problem for the justice system.

“Operation Shanela has been lauded by the South African Police Services as highly effective in removing criminals from the streets. In January this year, the minister announced that over 1-million arrests have been made since the inception of the operation in May 2023. While this number is laudable, the gap between arrests and convictions continues to be an Achilles heel on the justice system. We cannot praise a million arrests and we only have less than 10% conviction of the million arrests because we could be arresting the same person again,” he said.

At the centre of the low conviction rate is a failure to adequately staff the detective services to keep up with demand. The ratio of 1 police officer for every 413 people in South Africa is significantly higher than the UN-recommended ratio of 1 officer per 220 people, according to the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu).

The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) has always maintained that their members are not just struggling with staff shortages, “but they are also poorly equipped, with many police stations having challenges regarding the uneven allocation of resources”.

A 2019 report by the community safety department in the Western Cape found that detectives are under-resourced, lack training and that their work is not guided by intelligence.

In her presentation, the chairperson of the portfolio committee on correctional services, Kgomotso Ramolobeng revealed that up until the end of June this year, there was “a total of 166,008 inmates in correctional centres across the country, of which 104,117 [were] sentenced, and 61,891 remand detainees”.

Ramolobeng told parliament and journalists that the number of detainees awaiting trial is the biggest contributor to overcrowding in the country’s jails. “We are concerned about the staggering cost of keeping and maintaining remand detainees in correctional facilities, which currently costs the department R482 per day and just above R13,000 per month for each detainee,” she said.

Cameron said that the detective services needs to be strengthened and that all components of the justice, crime prevention and security cluster must be integrated to “close the gap between arrests and convictions”.

“In the next two or three weeks we will have a session regarding an integrated justice system and a lot of money has already been spent on it. Hopefully we will get feedback on what that process is because I can tell you if we continue with this old approach where one department has different strategic goals to the other, we are being counterproductive,” Cameron said.