Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) president Zizamele Cebekhulu said on Wednesday that South Africa’s current method of compiling crime statistics is flawed in data collection and methodology.

He was addressing delegates at the three-day Policing Indaba, being held in Johannesburg, by Popcru.

Also in attendance are Congress of South African Trade Unions president Zingiswa Losi and Gauteng Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Elias Mawela.

Cebekhulu said the recent crime statistics painted a bleak picture despite the small signs of improvements. He added that the country’s crime statistics were alarming and were not aligned with the realities facing citizens.

He called for a thorough review of the country’s crime statistics as a matter of urgency and argued that the police should question whether they are failing in the fight against crime.

Cebekhulu said operations of the Criminal Justice Act needed some cohesion and warned that if it was not done, the country was doomed to fail.  

He said Popcru believed that the crime statistics must not only come from the police but from the whole justice chain, including the courts.

He noted that government often relied on the South African Defence Force if police were overwhelmed. He said it was clear that more police officers were required on the ground.

“Calling on soldiers to fight [for] the law shows that the police service is failing to provide [the] service of fighting crime,” said Cebekhulu.

He pointed out that heightened crime also impacted the country’s economy.

He hopes that the Policing Indaba will come up with the strategies to combat crime in the country.

Resource allocation, he noted, was also vital for police officers.

He welcomed the R7.8-billion allocated to the police by government, which he said would beef up the police service with more boots on the ground, but warned that a lack of police stations, especially in rural areas, was also an inhibiting factor in the fight against crime as some police stations were poorly designed and some did not have holding cells.

Additionally, Popcru is not happy that around 36 000 police officers are working on admin instead of fighting crime on the ground.

GUN LAWS

Cebekhulu warned that the country would see more violence if the laws around guns were not tightened.

He noted that recent statistics showed that 3.8-million guns were circulating in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

He called for another amnesty period to collect illegal firearms.

He said greater oversight should be done to ensure that firearms did not end up in the wrong hands.

POLICE ACADEMY

He added that while recruiting new police officers is a step in the right direction, Popcru says government cannot solve issues by throwing money at it, without monitoring the situation.

Cebekhulu said while new recruits would make a significant difference in police visibility, training facilities were poorly maintained and were preventing students from receiving quality training.

POLICE KILLINGS & GBV

Popcru is concerned by the recent crime statistics that show an increase in police officer deaths.

Cebekhulu pointed out that those who killed police officers should be charged with treason.

“A threat to a police member is a threat to a South African,” he said.

Meanwhile, he accused the State of being lenient on gender-based violence (GBV) perpetrators by allowing State attorneys to represent alleged rapists in courts.

He said this means the state is defending GBV perpetrators in the country.

“The time of talking has been done, let us act, from family units, society and [as] a country,” said Cebekhulu.

He also called for all police officers to be trained on using rape testing kits and for the kits to be rolled out to the police stations.

He claimed that GBV is dire in rural areas owing to customary laws in place.