The Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS) has fully backed the call by first National Commissioner of the new South African Police Service (SAPS) George Fivaz to fundamentally “restructure and redirect” policing to halt more than a decade of steep and accelerating decline.

This comes after the recent plea by Fivaz to the Government of National Unity (GNU) to urgently address the decline within the SAPS.

It is of vital strategic importance that the SAPS focuses on reducing the murder rate and substantially raises the service quality of its 1 169 stations across South Africa as a starting point for change in policing. The ISS restructuring call comes after ongoing reports about police involvement in crime, and ongoing organisational challenges highlighted by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Police and the Auditor-General.

According to policing expert Gareth Newham, Head of the ISS Justice and Violence Prevention Programme, a wide variety of SAPS indicators from their Annual Reports to Parliament show an ongoing decline in key performance areas going back to 2012.

This includes an over 60% decline in the detection or solving rate of murder dockets.  In 2012, the SAPS was able to solve over 31% of murder dockets, but by 2023 this had dropped only 12.4%.

Thus the vast majority of murders went unsolved that year and, as the ability to solve murder dockets decreased, so did the murder rate increase over the same period. By 2023, the number of murders was 78% higher than the number recorded in 2012, said Newham.

The case for urgent action by the SAPS was thus clear, with Newham saying the extent of decline across the various capabilities of the organisation could not be ignored and needed to be addressed decisively.

Despite the first signs of organisational decline in 2013, SAPS management systems and structures were not able to ensure they were addressed. This had partly to do with what the 2012 National Development Plan termed, the “serial crises of top management” – during the state capture years, there was a high level of political interference in top management structures.

Police Ministers and SAPS National Commissioners were changed every couple of years with criminality and corruption reaching the highest levels of the organisation.  Former SAPS National Commissioner, Khomotso Phahlane, along with a deputy national commissioner, former provincial commissioners and other former senior officials are facing charges of corruption. Former Head of Crime Intelligence Richard Mdluli has already served prison time for violent crimes including kidnapping and is facing prosecution for corruption.

“Unless there is a fundamental overhaul of the senior management structure and its systems, to ensure measurable improvements in capability and accountability across the SAPS,  it is unlikely we will see any notable changes in the GNU’s present term,” said Newham.

There are many excellent men and women in the SAPS at all levels, but the organisational culture and systems do not enable them to achieving the SAPS constitutional mandate, Newham said.

Ongoing challenges

There are a number of warning signs that the SAPS needs to be reformed, such as the VIP Protection Unit accounting for R2 billion in annual costs, excluding hundreds of millions of Rands claimed in overtime;

The departure of trained specialists and detectives from the SAPS (the SAPS lost 11% of its personnel between 2012 and 2021 as it could not afford to replace those who left);

A dysfunctional Crime Intelligence department;

And a large number of firearms losses: 28 969 SAPS-issued firearms were reported lost or stolen between 2003 and 2023 and between April and November 2023 alone, 357 firearms were stolen from SAPS 13 stores – which could only happen with police involvement.

Speaking about factions and personal agendas, Newham said the “shadow counter-culture within the SAPS means it is simply not realistic for a Minister of Police and National Commissioner to think that they are in control of the organisation. Policies and instructions are often ignored by many in the command structure,  which is why the complete restructuring of SAPS is necessary.”

In short, the SAPS could already be regarded as non-directable in any meaningful policy or operational sense, said both Newham and Fivaz.