With South Africa's rate of murder and crimes against women among the world's highest, the country's leading forensic pathologists, the SA Medical Research Council and police crime scene experts say the failure to attend postmortems carries potentially dire consequences for murder prosecutions.
Jeanine Vellema, who heads the Wits Clinical Department of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, said it was "very worrying".
"While we understand that they are overburdened by caseloads, not attending can potentially jeopardise the outcome of a court case if certain evidence is not collected. As forensic pathologists we simply don't know what evidence might be relevant to a case.''
She said for years they had been working on a memorandum of understanding to force police to attend autopsies.
"It's meant to be completed soon, but we don't know when exactly."
Gerard Labuschagne, former head of the SAPS Investigative Psychology Unit, who oversaw the research while in the police force, said when a death was suspected to have been from a criminal act or possible suicide, it was essential that police attend autopsies to convey information from the crime scene and obtain information about the cause of death.
"A wound that might look like a stab wound could actually be a gunshot wound. If you do not know there was a gun involved you would never know to do gunshot residue tests or look for a firearm.
"The Western Cape Health Department has a memorandum of understanding with the police, which says detectives must attend the autopsy, while the national detective learning programme - which is the detectives' current training manual - prescribes how officers should attend to postmortems."