Police are neglecting oath to serve and protect

It is only extraordinary and high-profile murder cases that the police seem to care about, with a lot left to be desired by the commitment of the thin blue line to solving South Africa's violent crimes.

Research from the Wits faculty of health sciences paints a grim picture, especially when it comes to the attendance of postmortems of victims of gunshot murders and sexual violence.

Conducted at South Africa's busiest morgue, the Johannesburg mortuary, two separate pieces of research reveal glaring apathy by police when it comes to attending post mortems.

Researchers discovered that, in 2016, when it came to women murdered through sexual violence, police were absent from more than 82% of the postmortems at the mortuary.

One of the researchers' objectives was to see whether police prioritised cases of women murdered in sexual attacks. Clearly not.

When it came to postmortems of those murdered by firearms, police attended fewer than 7% - and, perhaps even worse, failed to collect ballistic evidence from the bodies.

The importance of attending postmortems of murder victims is self-evident. A body, even though it may have been removed, is still part of the crime scene. With Wits Professor Jeanine Vellema saying they need police at the postmortem to direct them on what potential evidence to look for, it's astounding that officers would be absent.

Is it laziness, incompetence, a massive workload or a lack of vehicle resources?

We will never know, because police management chose to ignore our questions.

Their lack of response indicates how seriously police management takes its constitutional duty and oath to serve and protect our citizens.